PyroFutures (WUI)
Forecasting the Future of the Wildland-Urban Interface: A Journey to 2100 and Beyond
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) stands at the crossroads of nature and human development, a dynamic arena where environmental and societal forces collide. As global temperatures rise, urbanisation accelerates, and the spectre of climate change looms ever larger, the WUI faces unprecedented challenges. From devastating wildfires threatening millions of households to sea-level rise poised to submerge coastal cities, humanity finds itself grappling with an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. By 2100, projections suggest a mass displacement of populations, with potentially one-fifth of the global population classified as climate refugees. This upheaval will reshape the fabric of societies, economies, and geographies.
Drawing from ancient narratives of environmental upheaval, ‘Panta Rhei: Wildland Urban Interface Forecasts to 2100 and beyond’, Chapter 6.3.2 in Panarchistic Architecture (2018) contextualises the emerging risks within the WUI against the historical interplay of civilisation and nature. It highlights the dual threats of inundation and incineration, delving into the cascading impacts on infrastructure, ecosystems, and human security. As urban sprawl encroaches further into fire-prone regions and coastal zones, the imperative for adaptive strategies grows more urgent. Will technological innovations, policy interventions, and sustainable urban planning suffice to mitigate these challenges? Or are we destined to repeat the cycles of hubris and fall chronicled through history? This chapter explores these questions, charting a path towards resilience in the face of uncertainty.
Extract
“It’s a tale, or rather a power struggle narrative, [at least] as old as [anthropogenically- recorded] time: prophet warns humanity to curtail its environmentally and socially wayward conduct; humanity ignores said prophet, thus elicits the wrath of all- powerful forces that unleash a series of punishments, of which the spatiotemporal dimensions are eschatological: marking the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Scribed in Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets circa. 5tya, the oldest recorded incarnations thereof, including The Flood, Gilgamesh, and the myth to which the origin of ‘Pandora’ is attributed [129], the Epic of Creation (Dalley, 2008), emerged from an “inherently unpredictable natural world” (Leick, 2002, p.xviii). But, not merely in myth has global environmental change catalysed the destruction and the creation of civilisations, and of that which has emerged therefrom. The archaeological record evidences that, from the moment of their conception in the mythically- augmented [130] southern Mesopotamian city of Eridu, which founded in prehistory led the Ur-ban Revolution of the Uruk Period [circa. 6tya] cities have risen and fallen with tides and temperatures. Civilisation having developed during “a fortuitous lull following the end of a post-glacial storm” (McGuire, 2013, p.11), once again finds itself facing an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. Urbanisation proceeding apace from the 1700s, by 2000, more than 50% of the terrestrial biosphere constituted not biome, but “anthrome” [agricultural and urbanised land] (Bistinas et al, 2013, p.2), and if the projections of some are correct, that figure will rise as the century unfolds.
Currently, just under 2m Californian households are at “high or extreme risk” from wildfires (Gardner, 2014). A study by Mann et al (2013) predicts that by 2050 this sum will have risen by 50%, as a further 12m wildland acres join the exurban land classes. However, in the still inherently unpredictable world that humanity inhabits, the figure could be yet greater than 3m.
Climate change may make manifest the largest diaspora in all human history, as not millions, but hundreds of millions of people migrate en masse [131] in response to rising seas, desertification and land-degradation more generally, and as resultant conflicts ensue (Rigaud et al, 2018; Adger et al, 2014; Confine, 2014; Kimura, 2010; Brown, 2008; Stern et al, 2006). Worldwide, one person per second was displaced by conflict, violence or disasters during 2016, of which 24.2 million fled floods, storms, wildfires, and severe weather events (IDMC, 2018). While, of the sum thereof, just 1.1m were U.S. residents (Ibid), given the bandwidth of climate trajectories and environmental impacts as may result therefrom, here through 2100, both internal and inward migration, legal and otherwise, may rise sharply. Bringing perspective thereto, analysis by Geisler and Currens (2017), estimate that 1/5 people will be climate refugees by 2100. The direction of travel inland as coastal regions become submerged by rising seas and storm surges, the scale of movement may be so great as for military strategists to consider U.S. national and international security at threat (Carrington, 2016). Amongst others, the World Bank considers humanity so “badly prepared” to deal with the scale and speed of the changes as may occur as to place the global economy at risk (Elliot, 2016), the conclusion thereof echoing that which peers have privately expressed since the early 2000s.
Read ‘Panta Rhei: Wildland Urban Interface Forecasts to 2100 and beyond’, in ‘Panarchistic Architecture’ in full here.
Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.