Rare and highly destructive wildfires drive human migration in the U.S.
This study investigated the 519 most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S. between 1999 and 2020, examining direct and indirect pathways of wildfire-driven impacts on human migration. In recent decades, wildfire destruction of the built environment has grown dramatically, posing a growing threat to human settlements across the U.S. This trend is driven in part by changes in wildfire patterns, with records showing increases in total acres burned, number of large fires, and length of fire weather season
The findings indicate that wildfires affect migration patterns non-linearly at high levels of structure loss, as housing and other infrastructure are destroyed, and residents subsequently relocate. Only a small portion of destructive wildfires caused a migratory response, and such rare events influenced mobility primarily through destruction to the built environment. Even among the top ten percent of the most destructive wildfires in the contiguous U.S., it was only the most extreme among these events that caused an increase in out-migration.
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