SLIDE 1
Management of Alaskan wildfires for climate mitigation
Carly Phillips, Brendan Rogers & Peter Frumhoff October 9th, 2018
Woods Hole Research Center
Management of Alaskan wildfires for climate mitigation Carly - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Management of Alaskan wildfires for climate mitigation Carly - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Management of Alaskan wildfires for climate mitigation Carly Phillips, Brendan Rogers & Peter Frumhoff Woods Hole Research Center October 9th, 2018 Rising temperatures RCP 2.6 RCP 8.5 Aggressive reductions Business as usual Carbon
SLIDE 2
SLIDE 3
Rising temperatures
RCP 2.6 Aggressive reductions RCP 8.5 Business as usual
SLIDE 4
SLIDE 5
Mishra & Riley, 2012 McGuire et al., 2016 (USGS)
Alaska
- 18% of US land area
- ~1/2 of US land carbon (Zhu
and McGuire, 2016)
Carbon storage
SLIDE 6
No mention of Alaskan wildfires
SLIDE 7
Wil ildfire – in increasin ing in in area burned and cost
SLIDE 8
Future projections North America Eurasia
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
Kirilenko [2002] Dixon and Krankina [1993] Tchebakova et al. [2009] Bachelet et al. [2005] Flannigan et al. [2000] Genet et al. [2013] Flannigan and Van Wagner [1991] Wotton et al. [2003] Girardin and Mudelsee [2008] Krawchuk and Cumming [2011] de Groot et al. [2003] Amiro et al. [2009] Euskirchen et al. [2009] Flannigan et al. [2005] Bergeron et al. [2010] Wotton et al. [2010] Krawchuk et al. [2009] Wang et al. [2015] Young et al. [2016] Boulanger et al. [2014] Terrier et al. [2014] Balshi et al. [2009] Podur and Wotton [2010]
% increase in burned area by 2100
SLIDE 9
Alaska
- 18% of US land area
- ~1/2 of US land carbon (Zhu
and McGuire, 2016)
- ~1/2 of US fire
carbon emissions
(Veraverbeke et al., 2017; van der Werf et al., 2017)
Carbon storage
SLIDE 10
Cost-Benefit Analysis Give everything a dollar value
costs of suppression vs. damages from carbon emissions
SLIDE 11
A quantitative measure of the long term damage done by a ton
- f carbon dioxide emissions in a
given year
Social Cost of Carbon (CO2)
EPA
$40-50/metric ton CO2
SLIDE 12
Alaska large fire years (2004, 2005, 2015)
- Average 66 Tg C emitted
- ~1/3 entire US land C sink
- $2.2B – $19.1B using EPA’s social cost of C
June 14, 2015 September 1, 2015
SLIDE 13
Cost-Benefit Analysis
SLIDE 14
Data for CB Analysis
Suppression costs from previous fire seasons ($) Emissions from previous fire seasons (CO2 -> $) Ecosystem C storage (kg/km2 -> $/km2 )
SLIDE 15
Local & Regional engagement
SLIDE 16
Federal engagement
SLIDE 17
- Raise the profile of Alaskan wildfire and carbon
- Recommend targeted changes to FMZs
- Determine where and when suppression is an economically
sound climate mitigation strategy
We want our project to
SLIDE 18
Contact Information
Carly Phillips – cphillips@ucsusa.org Brendan Rogers – brogers@whrc.org Peter Frumhoff – pfrumhoff@ucsusa.org Union of Concerned Scientists – ucsusa.org Woods Hole Research Center – whrc.org
Woods Hole Research Center
SLIDE 19
SLIDE 20
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Cost - Pre-suppression Cost -Suppression Net-value change (NVC) Cost+NVC
SLIDE 21
SLIDE 22
Fire forcings
SLIDE 23
SLIDE 24
Stocks and Martell, 2016