The view from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California can be beautiful – pine forests and chaparral spill across an often rugged landscape. But as more people build homes in this area, where development gets into wild land, they’re facing some of the highest risks for wildfires in the country.

The type of trees, plants and grasses at any location will influence how likely the area is to burn. However, our new research shows that some areas of the wildland-urban interface – the land where development ends and wilderness begins – are at much higher risk of burning than others. A key reason is how vulnerable the local vegetation is to drying out in a warming climate.

In a study published Feb. 7, 2022, our team of climate scientists, fire scientists and eco-hydrologists mapped out where vegetation is creating the highest fire risks across the western U.S. We then compared that map to where in the region people have been moving into the wildland-urban interface.

We were surprised to discover that the fastest rate of population growth by far has been in the areas with the highest fire risk. This includes several areas in California, Oregon, Washington and Texas.

Plant sensitivity has a large effect on fires

When a fire does break out, the amount of area that burns increases significantly if a region’s vegetation is drought sensitive, meaning it dries up easily after periods of little rainfall and hot temperatures.

Just as a succulent is better at surviving a water shortage than, say, a citrus tree, some vegetation loses moisture more quickly in dry conditions. Such diverse sensitivity can have a strong effect on wildfires. In fact, we found that under the same increase in droughtlike conditions, burned area increases twice as much in the most sensitive regions as the least sensitive regions. As a result, fire hazard in regions like California, eastern Oregon, and central Arizona has far outstripped the average. But what about human exposure to wildfires?

The wildland-urban interface population boom

We found that while the number of people living in the wildland-urban interface overall roughly doubled from 1990 to 2010, the population in its highest-hazard regions grew by 160%. As more people move into these areas, the opportunity for fires to ignite rises, as does the number of people at risk.

In all, the population of those high-hazard areas grew from 1 million in 1990 to 2.6 million in 2010, the latest year with detailed population data. That’s an increase equivalent to the current populations of San Francisco and Seattle combined.

More people still live in the low-hazard regions of the wildland-urban interface, where the population grew 107%, from 5 million in 1990 to 10.4 million in 2010, but the high-hazard regions have seen much faster growth.

We don’t know what is causing the population boom in these highly sensitive areas of the western U.S. Building codes, timber-dependent communities and people seeking homes surrounded by forests may have contributed to the expansion of the wildland-urban interface, but those factors alone don’t explain why population would rise the most in the most vulnerable regions.

However, a map of vegetation’s sensitivity to water shortages can provide some insight. By linking satellite-based estimates of vegetation dryness to climate observations, we created continental-scale maps of vegetation moisture. For the first time, we now know the precise locations of the most drought-vulnerable and hence fire-prone vegetation.

The map shows that the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Central California, the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and San Antonio all have drought-sensitive vegetation and saw populations expand in the wildland-urban interface.

Further studies examining the demographics and local land use and development regulations in such regions can shed light on the drivers of growth in these high-risk areas. In the Bay Area, for example, a lack of affordable housing has pushed people farther from cities and may be encouraging more development in the wildland-urban interface, including high-risk areas that hadn’t previously been developed.

What can people living in high-risk areas do?

The disproportionate population growth in high-hazard areas is a warning that the likelihood of humans sparking a fire in an area with high-risk vegetation is rising – and that it may be higher than was previously understood.

Community leaders can use this knowledge to identify where human activity overlaps with drought-sensitive regions to improve local land-use planning, prepare firefighting resources and develop safer evacuation routes.

Property owners can keep a safe defensible space of at least a 100 feet of nonvegetated land on all sides of a home to help protect their structures when wildfires occur. Retrofitting homes using fire-retarding materials or double-paned windows can help too.

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Preventive measures like these can limit the ballooning losses from wildfires, including devastating air quality due to wildfire smoke, while also allowing humans to more safely coexist with natural fires.

Preparing homes for wildfires can take months, so it’s important to use the winter, when many of these areas have their wet seasons, to be ready by the time the land dries out and wildfires ramp up in spring.

Krishna Rao, Ph.D. candidate in Earth System Science, Stanford University; Alexandra Konings, Assistant Professor of Earth System Sciences, Stanford University; Marta Yebra, Associate professor, Australian National University; Noah Diffenbaugh, Professor of Earth System Science, Stanford University, and Park Williams, Associate Professor of Hydroclimatology, University of California, Los Angeles

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More Americans are using flexible workplace practices – including telecommuting, co-working and off-peak start times – to add flexibility to their lives and eliminate or improve their commute.

One motivation? Rush hour traffic is getting worse, and commute times are getting longer.

For example, the average American today spends close to an hour getting to and from work. It’s worse in big cities. In the greater New York area, commutes average 1 hour 14 minutes round-trip.

We’re experts in urban planning and development, and started wondering why worsening traffic wasn’t encouraging more people to telecommute.

What do we know about workplace flexibility?

Telecommuting – or working at home – has many benefits. Workers have been modifying commutes ever since the phone and portable computers made it possible.

Advances in technology within the last decade have greatly expanded our ability to work from anywhere at any time. Many of us are taking advantage of this flexibility.

Census estimates show that the percentage of the workforce working from home the majority of the week grew from 3.3% in 2000 to 5.3% in 2018, and is growing faster than additions to the workforce.

Most people adopt flexible workplace practices just a few times a month rather than full-time, and these numbers are also growing.

How workers win

What are the benefits of telecommuting?

For one thing, it allows workers to seek cheaper housing, yet still have access to a large job market.

They can also use time previously spent commuting in more productive ways.

Companies that offer flexible workplace practices have a competitive edge because they are more attractive to workers. Many high-tech businesses and startups cater to their employees’ needs in order to attract and retain talent because talent is critical to innovation.

Flexible workplace practices can also increase an organization’s productivity. Studies have shown that workers who have control over their schedules and places of work are more satisfied and productive. They don’t quit as often or take as many sick days.

But even with these benefits, most organizations are still not comfortable granting flexibility to their workers.

Obstacles to flexibility

Our recent report showed that many workers we surveyed viewed managerial and executive resistance to telework as a major obstacle.

Through interviews, we learned that executives saw the benefits of using flexible work to their advantage as a negotiating tool for recruitment, promotion, retention and motivation, but they often worried about the costs of training and potential culture change.

They expressed concern that allowing telecommuting could create inequitable outcomes in the workplace, and possibly negatively impact morale.

Because flexible workplace practices provide so many benefits, we believe policymakers should encourage its implementation. In Atlanta, which has seen one of the fastest-growing commute times of any city, policymakers have implemented telework programs.

It has paid off. From 2008 to 2017, the number of commuters working from home increased from 5.7% to 7.3%.

There are no easy fixes here. Even if organizations become more willing to allow flexible workplace practices, we will likely never see a future in which the roads are free of congestion.

That’s because any traffic decreases will result in people that were previously using alternatives joining the roads. This is called “triple convergence” in the field of transportation research, and it is the principle that congestion self-adjusts.

In other words, you can add more lanes to a highway, but after a while people will catch on, begin using the route and congestion will stay the same or increase.

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Mohja Rhoads, Research Consultant and Lecturer in Policy, Planning and Development, California State University, Dominguez Hills and Fynnwin Prager, Assistant Professor of Public Administration, California State University, Dominguez Hills

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Children who lived with at least one foreign-born parent in 2019 had different characteristics than children who lived with native-born parents. Those with at least one foreign-born parent were more likely to live with two parents but didn’t fare as well economically.

While the majority of children under 18 in the United States lived with native-born parents in 2019 (69.7%), over a quarter (26.3%) lived with at least one foreign-born parent, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report.

The remaining 4% of children had no parents present. Among those with at least one foreign-born parent, the majority (87.7%) were native-born.

Presence of parents

The living arrangements of children are diverse and vary across many characteristics, including parental nativity.

Regardless of nativity status, most children live with two parents, but children with at least one foreign-born parent (82.6%) were more likely to live with two parents in 2019 than children with native-born parents (69.5%).

Consequently, children with at least one foreign-born parent were less likely than children with native-born parents to live with either their mother only or their father only.



Parental marital status

Children with at least one foreign-born parent were also more likely than children with native-born parents to live with two married parents — 77.9% and 65.0%, respectively.

However, the percentage of children in these two groups who lived with two unmarried parents did not differ statistically.

Children with native-born parents were more likely than children with at least one foreign-born parent to live with one parent, regardless of whether the parent had ever married.

Among children with native-born parents, the percentage with only one parent who ever married did not significantly differ from the percentage with only one parent who never married.

Household economic characteristics

Children with native-born parents fared better on certain household economic characteristics than children with at least one foreign-born parent.

Those with at least one foreign-born parent, for example, were more likely than children with native-born parents to live below the poverty line (19.9% compared to 14.1%) and have no health insurance coverage (8.9% compared to 5.0%).

They were also more likely to live in a rented home: just under half (48.6%) compared to a third (33.1%) of children with native-born parents.

Although some household-level characteristics show that children living with at least one foreign-born parent were less economically secure, they also show that they were less likely to live in a household that received public assistance.

The recently released report is an update of a longstanding series on the living arrangements of children, first published in 1994.

The report uses data from the 2007 and 2019 Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements, 2008 and 2018 1-Year American Community Surveys and 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation Wave 1.

Household-level economic characteristics for children under 18 by parental nativity status: 2019

Lydia Anderson and Paul Hemez are survey statisticians in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch.

The U.S. economy surprised analysts by adding 467,000 jobs in January, overcoming omicron concerns and continuing a long streak of gains, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Feb. 4, 2022.

Yet at the same time, the unemployment rate ticked up a notch, from 3.9% to 4%.

Confused? Shouldn’t a large increase in jobs drive joblessness lower?

I believe the main culprit behind these conflicting results is a jump in the number of people rejoining the job market – in fact, the biggest increase in 19 months.

The share of working-age Americans either in work of looking for work – known as the labor participation rate – dropped steeply at the beginning of the pandemic.

But there are signs that labor participation may finally be turning around. From a low of 60.2% in April 2020, it has slowly risen since. And the latest report showed it climbed a further 0.3 percentage point to 62.2% in January, the highest since the depths of the pandemic in mid-2020. The 2.2 percentage point gain since April 2020 may not seem huge, but it equates to about 5.8 million people rejoining the workforce.

As an economist who has been following the labor market closely for the past year, I think people are being both encouraged and forced back into looking for work. My interpretation of the evidence suggests that those who quit and held off getting back into the labor force are now finding job opportunities that are too valuable to pass up.

For one thing, wages continue to increase – they grew rapidly in January 2022, with average hourly wages up 5.6% from a year earlier.

At the same time, it appears that many businesses are responding to workers’ desires for some flexibility in scheduling and a better work/life balance.

Greater job flexibility can be seen in the jump in the number of Americans working remotely. The number of employees working from home because of the pandemic increased to 15.4% of the workforce in January, as the omicron variant spread and staffers were given the option to work from home.

But it isn’t just employer-driven factors behind the increase in labor participation.

For those without a job and stable income, personal resources can get depleted over time. Some people who left the workforce early on in the pandemic may have been able to get by and cover essential spending such as housing and groceries by relying on personal savings, support from family members or generous pandemic-related government benefits.

Those resources are not infinite, however. The number of long-term unemployed Americans declined in January, following a trend observed throughout 2021, suggesting that a growing number are returning to the workforce.

Moreover, the cost of living is soaring at the fastest pace in 40 years. And for households that had been relying on a single income during the pandemic, the problem is made worse by the fact that wages are lagging behind, putting pressure on families.

In other words, job holdouts might not be able out hold out much longer if inflation continues to outpace wage increases.

But even with the uptick in the labor participation rate, the U.S. economy still has a long way to go before the ongoing labor shortages hammering companies end and the job markets return to pre-pandemic levels.

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Christopher Decker, Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska Omaha

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More than two years after the first cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed, people are exhausted by the coronavirus pandemic, ready for all this to end. When – if ever – is it realistic to expect SARS-CoV-2 will recede from the headlines and daily life?

That’s the unspoken question beneath the surface of many of The Conversation’s articles about COVID-19. None of our authors can see the future, but many do have expertise that offers insights about what’s reasonable to expect. Here are four such stories from our archive. Written by historians and scientists, they each suggest a way to think about what’s at the end of the pandemic tunnel – and paths to get there.

1. Past pandemics are not a perfect prediction

Almost as soon as it hit, people were trying to figure out how the COVID-19 pandemic would proceed. It was tempting to look for clues in the course of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Could the waves of disease seen in the 1900s provide a road map for what could be expected a century later?

Daily deaths from COVID-19 were declining in the U.S. when historian Mari Webel and virologist Megan Culler Freeman from University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences cautioned against reading too much into how things had gone for people generations ago.

It was so tempting to superimpose a timeline of flu surges on the modern calendar to get even a blurry forecast of what the coronavirus might have in store for us. “Scanning the historical record is one way to draw our own lives into focus and perspective,” wrote Webel and Culler Freeman. “Unfortunately, the end of influenza in summer 1919 does not portend the end of COVID-19 in the summer of 2020.”

And for reasons ranging from biology to demographics to politics, that is one prediction that most certainly came true.

2. Calling it over before it’s really over

While the 1918 flu pandemic wasn’t an exact template for how the coronavirus would sweep the world, the earlier pandemic provided plenty of parallels when it came to human behavior.

University of Michigan historian J. Alexander Navarro described how in the early 20th century Americans essentially quit on effective social distancing precautions when they got fed up with living constrained lives. Sound familiar?

As case numbers declined, “People clamored to return to their normal lives. Businesses pressed officials to be allowed to reopen,” Navarro wrote. “Believing the pandemic was over, state and local authorities began rescinding public health edicts.”

With the burden of public health resting on individual choices, additional waves of flu crashed over the population. Some amount of wishful thinking, along with a premature return to “normal,” was likely to blame. People’s choices can affect whether an infectious disease outbreak ends or drags on.

3. Once a virus comes, it never really leaves

Infectious diseases are as old as humanity. Pointing to examples such as malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy and measles, Rutgers University – Newark historian Nükhet Varlik wrote, “Once added to the repertoire of pathogens that affect human societies, most infectious diseases are here to stay.” Only smallpox has been completely eradicated, thanks to an intense global vaccination campaign.

Varlik’s own research has focused on plague, a bacterial disease that’s caused at least three pandemics in the past 5,000 years – including the 14th century’s Black Death – along with many more localized outbreaks over the years. Outbreaks wound down based on factors like “changes in temperature, humidity and the availability of hosts, vectors and a sufficient number of susceptible individuals,” Varlik wrote. “Some societies recovered relatively quickly from their losses caused by the Black Death. Others never did.”

The responsible bacterium, Yersinia pestis, is still with us today.

4. The endemic endgame

A post-pandemic world may still have COVID-19 in it. Many researchers suspect that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus will become endemic, meaning it’s always around, with some level of constant ongoing transmission. The viruses that cause the flu and the common cold, for instance, are endemic.

Sara Sawyer, Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero and Cody Warren, a team of virologists and immunologists from the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote that SARS-CoV-2 might hit the sweet spot for a virus to become endemic by being just the right degree of transmissible: “Generally speaking, viruses that are highly contagious, meaning that they spread really well from one person to the next, may never die out on their own because they are so good at finding new people to infect.”

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SARS-CoV-2 spreads easily through the air. Even people who aren’t experiencing any symptoms can pass the coronavirus to others. These factors, along with today’s heavily interconnected global society, make it unlikely COVID-19 is going away completely anytime soon.

For now, these scholars write, the best we can likely hope for is stabilized rates of SARS-CoV-2 that settle down into predictable patterns, like flu season. If you want to help hurry things along toward this end stage, do what you can to make yourself an inhospitable host for the coronavirus – most notably, keep up to date with recommended COVID-19 vaccinations.

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Maggie Villiger, Senior Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation

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