Oliver Morton

speaker

275 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Economist Podcasts · Burning questions: a more fire-prone world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

They're often deliberately set because of slash and burn agriculture.

And we have two seemingly unrelated things happening.

One is that the misbegotten war in the Gulf means that demand for biofuels, which drive some of the slash and burn, is going up.

And at the same time, we have an El Nino effect, the opposite of La Nina, which is drying out that part of Southeast Asia.

And so people worried about Indonesian wildfires are looking at a very bad second half of this year.

There's also the risk, as there always is, that there'll be something quite dramatic in Australia.

The situation isn't quite like the one that brought about the 2019 wildfires, and fire seasons can be very sensitive to the initial conditions.

But

you'd look at the objective facts of there being an El Nino going on and what appears to be a positive direction for one of the other big climate markers called the Indian Ocean Dipole.

And you worry about the coming fire season in Australia.

But as you say, you shouldn't be worrying just about the places where you're used to this.

And when you up the amount of fuel by putting in carbon dioxide, which makes plants grow faster, and you also increase temperatures, then bits of the world that like to burn like to burn even more.

Well, the first answer is you have to really care about preventing them.

And there are lots of things that people know how to do in terms of both landscape management and in terms of trying to control people's behaviors within those landscapes and trying to alter those landscapes with fire breaks and things like that.

All these things are not unknown, but how to do them best is not necessarily clear.

And they take time and they take real effort.

And

And the problem is that if the fires are getting worse and worse, that effort is harder to find.

What could be done better or what will we need more of?

Well, I think one of the things that's rather striking is that satellites do allow you to detect fires very, very quickly now.

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