Oliver Morton

speaker

147 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 5 Aug

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 — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Burning questions: a more fire-prone world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

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

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'll 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

Fighting

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.

And in some circumstances that might be really useful for being able to get to a fire before it gets too big, because after the fire that you stopped from getting started at all, the fire that you stopped when it was still very small is the best kind of fire.

Better modeling of how the fires are actually.

Likely to spread.

No one wants to bet their farm, possibly quite literally, on the model of a fire because they are capricious creatures.

It's possible that if you buy into some thinking about a new golden age of aviation with electrically powered aircraft, which we were writing about in the paper last week, and with drones that don't need to worry about the smoke effects or just the sheer danger of taking people around, you might be able to imagine.

and there being some parts of the world, by which I mean mainly the rich parts of the world, where that could also make a difference in the firefighting.

But when I say the different parts of the world, I think one of the m crucial things that may be missing at the moment is that uh there aren't very good mechanisms for places in the world learning from each other.

Many places are seeing increased fire risk.

I'm not sure that the question of what best practice is is being well enough hashed out.

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