Associate Professor Zhai Yujia from the School of Environment Published Her Perspective in Science
Recently, Associate Professor Zhai Yujia from the School of Environment at 91传媒 published her perspective titled "Wildfires: A Growing Threat to Water Security" in Science.
Wildfire propagates through rivers, aquifers, drinking water networks, and wastewater systems, producing cascading failures and structural changes in water availability and quality. Policy-makers and scientists must work together to redesign water governance—which treats wildfire as a problem constrained to land and air—to manage wildfire’s far-reaching effects.
Human exposure to the effects of wildfire has increased by about 40% in two decades, despite declining global burned area. Vulnerability is now shaped more by exposure to water contamination than to the fire itself. When rain falls on burned catchments (areas where water collects), vegetation loss and hydrophobic soil (i.e., soil that repels water) facilitate rapid runoff. Sediment, nutrients, and dissolved organic matter flow into rivers and overwhelm treatment plants within hours. Postfire storms can rapidly contaminate groundwater in fractured and shallow aquifers. In snow-dominated basins, canopy loss and soot-darkened snow accelerate melt, shifting runoff earlier and intensifying late-summer water shortages. These effects are not short-term disturbances but structural changes in water availability.
Wildfire also dismantles the biological machinery of water quality. Soil microbial communities collapse, especially fungi, and are replaced by heat-tolerant decomposers that accelerate nutrient release. Fire-derived dissolved organic matter and black carbon persist in rivers, increase oxygen demand, and suppress microbial processing, weakening natural self-purification.
Infrastructure turns ecological shock into human crisis. During recent North American fires, reservoirs remained clean while drinking water became toxic inside distribution systems, where plastic pipes melted and depressurized networks drew in smoke, causing extreme benzene contamination. Wastewater systems fail more quietly: Fires and blackouts disable treatment plants, and postfire storms overwhelm sewers with ash and metals, exporting poorly treated effluent downstream. These failures fall hardest on small utilities, private well users, and rural and Indigenous communities, which makes wildfire a driver of water inequality.
Wildfire has become a coupled land-water-atmosphere hazard, but fire management and water governance remain misaligned with this reality. Addressing wildfire as a systemic water risk requires integrated monitoring, predictive modeling, resilient infrastructure, equitable governance, and fire-adaptive landscape management. Fire is the new normal of the Anthropocene, and managers can no longer consider water security secondary to fighting flames.
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