In December 2023 a farmer was burning dry grapevines in his vineyard in Deir Mar Moussa, a hill town a dozen miles east of Beirut known for its 18th-century monastery and stands of pine forest. Usually this would be dangerous, given that Lebanon’s hot and dry climate can quickly turn a spark into a conflagration.

But on this day the worst was avoided. A device made by a German startup “smelled” the smoke from the farmer’s fire and sent out an alert, allowing authorities to prevent it from spreading. Given the recent explosion of global warming- fueled wildfires across the planet, quick detection is needed more than ever. In this case a device called Silvanet by Dryad Networks identified the unique gas patterns in the air that indicated something in Deir Mar Moussa was burning.

As the average global temperature rises and climate change advances, wildfires are becoming more catastrophic — like the Aug. 8, 2023, Lahaina wildfire — ravaging communities and releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Burning leaves and undergrowth can go undetected for hours, even days, until smoke is reported to authorities by bystanders or passing aircraft.

Since many forest fires smolder long before flames erupt, there’s an opening for a new generation of smoke detection equipment. Dryad’s chief executive, Carsten Brinkschulte, calls his an electronic nose. “If you get to a wildfire when it’s tiny, you have a lot more options that you can do than if you detect it when it’s 2, 3, 5 hectares in size,” he says. “It’s very hard to contain at that point.”

And as a logical extension of this, the nascent industry is already drawing up plans for squadrons of firefighting drones that someday may be permanently stationed among the trees, waiting for a signal to quench a fire before it can spread.

Annually, wildfires result in an additional 23,000 square miles of lost tree cover than was the case in 2001 — an area slightly bigger than Croatia. Hundreds die in such fires each year, while almost a half-million more lose their homes or are displaced. Each wildfire releases dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere that can increase the chances of disease and death for people hundreds or even thousands of miles away. A study published in October estimated 10,000 more people died each year in the 2010s than in the 1960s as a result of wildfire smoke.

And, of course, the more smoke, the worse global warming becomes. According to a study published in the journal Nature, wildfires in Canada in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, more than the annual fossil fuel emissions of any country save China, the U.S. and India. Since 2001, carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires have surged by 60%. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, the destruction they wreak on fauna and vegetation can have dire consequences for ecosystems and the scorched landscape left behind.

It was in 2018, a particularly bad year for wildfires, when Brinkschulte — a veteran German telecommunications executive — says it occurred to him that existing detection methods weren’t keeping up. Satellites can detect wildfires from space, and cameras can survey areas susceptible to outbreaks, but in both cases fires must already be large enough to produce visible smoke plumes or flames that breach the forest canopy.

Brinkschulte says he wanted to create a system that senses fires before they escalate with “a scalable, sustainable business model.” Each of Dryad’s Silvanet sensors is equipped with a metal oxide semiconductor layer that reacts with gases in the air. When hydrogen, carbon monoxide and other gases are present, as they are in the early stages of a fire, they alter the sensor’s electrical resistance, creating a specific “fingerprint,” according to Brinkschulte. AI then analyzes the gas composition in real time. Dryad says the system allows users to geolocate the origin of a fire down to a 320-foot radius of each device.

Dryad is by no means alone in this field. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has deployed sensors made by Rockville, Md.-based N5. Called N5SHIELD, they’re now situated across Maui — which on Aug. 8, 2023, suffered a catastrophic fire that claimed at least 102 lives, destroyed over 2,200 structures and caused approximately $5.5 billion in damage.

A power line in Lahaina that was damaged by high wind and reenergized after a visual inspection was found by an independent analysis to be a major contributing factor to the disaster. Many of the hundreds of lawsuits filed in the aftermath of the fire allege that the fast-moving inferno was fueled by dry vegetation.

Dryad says it has raised $23.8 million, mainly through venture capital equity investments and grants from the European Union. Silvanet is its core product, with more than 20,000 sensors shipped to date. Each one sells for less than $100 each, but customers must also pay a service fee for access to the company’s cloud-based platform.

One concern with sensor technology, however, is accuracy. If too sensitive, it could lead to false alerts. And while networks of individual detectors strapped to trees are useful along hiking paths and power lines traversing wooded areas, where fires often begin, they are less effective elsewhere. To quickly detect small fires across broader areas, cameras are needed.

Dryad hopes to move beyond detection to actual firefighting, launching autonomous drones that respond to fires like the one that almost happened in Deir Mar Moussa. “We are in a unique position where we detect fires so early, so the drones have a chance of extinguishing them,” Brinkschulte says.

In areas where wildfires break out regularly, drones using new fire suppression technology could be stationed, ensuring a rapid, automated response.

But Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, cautions against focusing too much on fire detection technologies. While there’s no question that early and accurate detection can help contain certain fires, it’s true only if you have the resources to use the information effectively. And in the right conditions, like when it’s windy, some fires will spread however early you detect them. “No amount of rapid detection is going to change tactics or outcome on some fires,” he says.

And more broadly, Wara cautions that as detection technologies help extinguish slow-spreading fires, they could leave fast-spreading fires more vegetation to fuel their growth. If we’re going to have these satellite technologies and cameras and sensors, we need to also invest in controlled burns, he says. “The risk is that we focus too much on detection, but we must not overlook mitigation and prevention,” Wara says.

This Bloomberg News story was distributed by Tribune Content Agency.