The Fire Studio: Wildfire, Forests, Jobs, & Carbon

Around the world, fire is posing a growing risk to people, forests, and ecosystems. Fire is not a new threat, but it is a growing and evolving one in this era of climate change, especially in the dry forests of the American West—on a warmer and drier planet, they have grown in severity and frequency. Firefighters are having to learn new tactics to combat increasingly intense and fast-moving wildfires; fire seasons are starting to become a year-round phenomenon. In 2011 the U.S. Forest Service coined the term “megafires” to describe the novel behavior of a growing number of wildfires of unprecedented size and severity, which burn over 100,000 acres. For more and more communities, megafires represent an immediate climate threat.

The studio will be situated in the dry forest landscapes of the Northern Sierra Mountains, in Northern California. Specifically, we will focus on the area in and around the Tahoe National Forest and Plumas National Forest, two public forests that provide multiple benefits to visitors and nearby communities.

The studio will invite experts to lecture and conduct workshops with the studio on topics of forest and fire management; forest carbon and carbon tracking; industrial logics for sawmills, biochar, and biomass energy; carbon finance and forest restoration projects; and forest resilience and restoration policy.