Climate change is increasing the already high risk of wildfires in Texas

Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires in Texas, a danger that became real this week when the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest in state history, raged out of control in the Panhandle region.

And that growing fire risk is starting to impact the insurance market in Texas, driving up premiums for homeowners and causing some insurers to withdraw from parts of the state.

For the Smokehouse Creek fire to grow so large so quickly, three weather conditions had to align: high temperatures, low relative humidity and high winds, said John Nielsen-Gammon, a Texas state climatologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.

On Monday, as the Smokehouse Creek fire began to spread, it was 82 degrees Fahrenheit in Amarillo. According to the National Weather Service, the average daytime high temperature in February is 54 degrees.

As of Thursday, a New York Times tracker based on federal data shows more than a million acres are burning, making the blaze one of the most destructive in U.S. history.

Temperatures in Texas have risen 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1975, according to Texas figures. a 2021 report from the state climatologist‘s office. The relative humidity in this region has also decreased, said Dr. Nielsen Gammon. It is less clear whether the winds have changed significantly.

Climate change is likely making fire season start earlier and last longer, he said, by increasing the number of days in a year with warm and dry weather conditions that enable wildfires.

Texas is currently the state with the second-highest number of properties vulnerable to wildfires, after Florida, according to analysis by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.

Wildfires occur in most of Texas during the summer. But in the Southern Plains, including the Texas Panhandle, fire risk is greatest around March, when temperatures are warm, strong winds blow across the flat landscape and dry grass left over from the previous growing season can easily catch fire.

Only about 1 percent of Texas wildfires occur in the Panhandle, but the region is responsible for half of the acres burned in the state, said Sean Dugan, a spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service. ‘They are not very numerous. But when they happen, they become very big,” he said.

Normally, in the absence of drought, the landscape begins to green in April and the Panhandle’s fire risk decreases. But this year there are “increased chances” of a dry spring and summer and a hot summer, said Dr. Nielsen Gammon. As a result, he expects fire risk to remain high in the Panhandle and could be higher in the rest of the state in the summer as well.

As the climate changes, the concept of a fire season becomes increasingly vague.

“In the past, there were distinct fire seasons in Texas, but fires have become a year-round threat,” Yongqiang Liu, a meteorologist at the US Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, said in an email.

Texans are noticing the increase in extreme weather events, said Jeremy Mazur, senior policy advisor at Texas 2036, a nonpartisan research organization that is helping to fund an extreme weather report written by the state climatologist.

One of residents’ top concerns is the rising cost of homeowners insurance, according to a recent survey conducted by Texas 2036. About 88 percent of the 1,000 likely voters surveyed expressed some concern about extreme weather events affecting the price they pay for property insurance to increase.

“The real impact we are starting to see from this growing wildfire risk is in the form of rising property insurance premiums,” Mr. Mazur said.

Homeowners in Texas saw their insurance rates increase 53.6 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to data collected by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That was the highest rate of any state except Arizona.

Allstate, the second-largest insurer in Texas, listed wildfires as one of the “largest areas of potential catastrophe losses” in a regulatory filing this month.

Some insurance companies have begun to withdraw from parts of the Texas market. People in Llano and Burnet counties, southwest of Dallas, report being dropped by their insurers due to wildfire risk, the news outlet said KXAN reported this last week.

State lawmakers are starting to take notice, but more action is needed, Mr. Mazur said. During the last term, a Republican representative from East Texas submitted a bill to require the Forest Service to recommend ways to reduce wildfire risks in the state. The bill was removed from the calendar before the end of the session.