Eighty-four percent of all wildfires in the United States are started by people, according to a new study, USA Today reports.
Jennifer Balch, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado who led the research on the study, said that the human-ignited fire season added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year during a span of 20 years, from 1992 to 2012.
The group evaluated over 1.5 million government records of wildfires that had to be extinguished or managed by state or federal agencies. The report was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
"Although considerable fire research in the United States has rightly focused on increased fire activity (larger fires and more area burned) because of climate change, we demonstrate that the expanded fire niche as a result of human-related ignitions is equally profound," the study said.
Fourteen people died and 134 were injured after a wildfire broke out in Gatlinburg, Tenn., last November.
Fighting wildfires, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has exceeded a cost of $2 billion in recent years. "For the first time in its 111-year history, over half of the Forest Service's 2015 budget was designated to fight wildfires, compared to just 16 percent in 1995. 2015 was the most expensive fire season in the department's history, costing more than $2.6 billion on fire alone," the USDA said in a news release last May.
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