Giving Compass' Take:

• Scientists explain the unprecedented danger facing the western US and call for new solutions to the growing threat of megafires. In the era of megafires, our choice is clear: find new solutions or face even greater disasters.

• Given the inevitability of wildfires, how will vulnerable towns survive or prepare properly? How can funders prevent death and damage caused by wildfires? 

• Read about a strategy for wildfire disaster relief.

California is no stranger to fire. The temperate winters and reliably dry summers that make the Golden state such an attractive place to live are the same conditions that make this region among the most flammable places on Earth.

But even for a region accustomed to fire, the continuing wildfire siege has proven unprecedented. Although it is only early August, numerous very large, fast-moving, and exceptionally intense fires have already burned vast swaths of land throughout the state – consuming hundreds of thousands of acres and thousands of homes and claiming at least nine lives, including four firefighters. State and national firefighting resources are stretched to their limits; choking smoke inundated the state capital of Sacramento; and much of Yosemite national park is closed indefinitely.

California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has characterized these devastating wildfires as California’s “new normal”. But it would be a mistake to assume that the region has reached any semblance of a stable plateau. Instead, the likelihood of large, fast-moving, and dangerous wildfires will continue to increase in the coming decades – and it will combine with other demographic and ecological shifts to produce a large increase in the risk of megafires that threaten both human lives and the ecosystems we depend upon.

Read more about California wildfires by Daniel Swain, Crystal Kolden, and John Abatzoglou at The Guardian.