Prescribed burns can decrease the severity of future fires by about 16 percent and slash smoke pollution by 14 percent, a new study has found.

These controlled blazes are much more effective outside the wildland-urban interface (WUI) — the area where homes meet wild vegetation — than within it, according to the study, published on Thursday in AGU Advances.

“Prescribed fire is often promoted as a promising tool in theory to dampen wildfire impacts, but we show clear empirical evidence that prescribed burning works in practice,” lead author Makoto Kelp, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, said in a statement.

“It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a strategy that can reduce harm from extreme wildfires when used effectively,” Kelp added.

Experts already consider prescribed burns to be an effective strategy for curbing the threat of wildfires, the researchers........

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