New York watches its skies turn grey with smoke from wildfires ravaging Canada’s forests. Bordeaux and Madrid count the cost of wildfires mere kilometres from their doors. Meanwhile, more than 200 wildfires were reported in England and Wales in the past fortnight.
In the past five years, global insurers’ losses due to climate change have doubled compared with the previous decade. In Europe, economic losses from extreme events such as floods, fires and droughts have grown by around €10bn every 12 years over the past five decades.
These extreme events and their economic impact are symptoms of an economic system suffering from a multi-organ crisis. That crisis is the result of following, for more than a century, a diet based on fossil resources.
The structural transformations that have led to extreme weather
Fossil resources are extracted, not regenerated, and our economy has extended this extractive relationship to everything around it, including the very infrastructure that regulates our planet: nature.
The current fossil-resource-based economic system has produced two major structural transformations that have brought us to today’s extreme situation.
Change in atmospheric physics: the planet is running a fever. For every degree Celsius the climate warms, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more water vapour, a relationship governed by the laws of thermodynamics.
This can increase evaporation and dry out soils and landscapes during hot, dry periods, making droughts and wildfires more frequent and intense. Conversely, a warmer atmosphere can also hold and release more moisture, increasing the risk of intense rainfall.
Droughts, fires and floods are, paradoxically, different faces of the same problem.
Socio-ecological change in our rural and urban landscapes: landscapes have also become increasingly simplified and degraded, making them less resilient to climate change at a time when extreme events are becoming more significant.
In many parts of the world, highly biodiverse and resilient natural ecosystems have been replaced with large monocultures that depend heavily on synthetic inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides.
These can degrade soils and erode the biodiversity that underpins the resilience of our landscapes. Healthy soils, for example, are better able to retain water, helping landscapes cope with both drought and heavy rainfall.
In many regions of Europe, this simplification has gone hand in hand with the abandonment of rural areas and an unprecedented concentration of people in urban centres. This has contributed to the decline of rural economies and a wider loss of the bonds that connect people to nature and its biological and ecological cycles.
What were once mosaic landscapes, where forests, wood pastures, livestock grazing and farmland coexisted, have in some places become vast, unmanaged expanses of continuous biomass.
At the same time, development has increasingly expanded into areas where urban and rural landscapes meet, creating urban-rural interfaces, such as housing developments close to forests and other vegetation, that are harder to manage in a context of climate emergency.
This means the solution to wildfires cannot come through investment in firefighting resources alone. That treats the symptoms, not the causes.
Nor will tactical prevention measures be enough on their own. As we have seen, the problem runs deeper. We cannot reshape the land at scale without also reshaping the economic model that helped create it.
The solution
We need a new model in which economic prosperity takes place within the ecological limits of our planet.
That means moving towards an economy aligned with the planet’s ecology: a bioeconomy, where bio means life, and where life, rather than fossil resources, is the engine and purpose.
In practice, that means focusing on renewable, nature-based and bio-based solutions, from wood-based alternatives for textiles and packaging to bio-based construction materials such as mass timber and mycelium.
These solutions need to be rooted in regenerative landscapes that enhance biodiversity, contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation, and support human health and wellbeing.
A circular bioeconomy can help draw investment, jobs and innovation into rural areas so they can realise their full potential.
At the same time, it can help address some of the structural causes behind wildfires and other environmental risks, including climate change and the degradation of socio-ecological systems.
As with any disease, recovery requires more than managing symptoms. We need to restore function to the organs that have failed and cool the fever at its source.
That means changing the diet: from fossil to biological, and from extractive to regenerative.
Overcoming the great dichotomies that have defined the industrial era — ecology and economy, rural and urban, progress and nature — will not be easy. But it is the only prescription that treats the cause.
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