Under a strategy now entering its second year, the U.S. Forest Service is trying to prevent out-of-control fires that start on public lands from raging through communities. But in an interview with The Associated Press, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack acknowledged that the shortage of workers thats been plaguing other sectors of the economy is hindering the agencys wildfire efforts.

He warned that draconian budget cuts floated by some Republicans, who control the U.S. House, could also undermine the Democratic administrations plans. Its goal is to lower wildfire risks across almost 80,000 square miles (200,000 square kilometers) of public and private lands over the next decade.

The work is projected to cost up to $50 billion. Last years climate and infrastructure bills combined directed about $5 billion to the effort.

Theres one big if,' Vilsack said. We need to have a good partner in Congress.

He added that fires on public lands will continue to threaten the West, after burning some 115,000 square miles (297,000 square kilometers) over the past decade an area larger than Arizona and destroying about 80,000 houses and other structures, according to government statistics and the nonpartisan research group Headwaters Economics.

Almost 19,000 of those structures were torched in the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, Calif.

Its not a matter of whether or not these forests will burn, Vilsack said. The crisis is upon us.

The sites targeted for spending in 2023 cover much of Southern California, home to 25 million people; the Klamath River Basin on the Oregon-California border; San Carlos Apache Reservation lands in Arizona; and the Wasatch area of northern Utah, a tourist draw with seven ski resorts. Other sites are in Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Washington state, Colorado, New Mexico and Montana.

The idea is to focus on hotspots that make up only a small portion of fire-prone areas but account for about 80% of risk to communities and developed infrastructure from houses to roads and power lines.

Critics of the administrations strategy say it remains overly focused on stopping fires a near-impossible goal with not enough money going to communities and populations at risk, including the elderly and people with medical conditions or disabilities.

Given the scale of how much needs to be done, we are just skimming the surface, said Headwaters Economics researcher Kimiko Barrett. Risks are increasing at a scale and magnitude that we havent seen historically. Youre seeing entire neighborhoods devastated.

Vilsack said the projects announced so far will help reduce wildfire risk to around 200 communities in the western U.S.

Warming temperatures have dried out the regions landscape and driven insect outbreaks that have killed millions of trees ideal conditions for massive wildfires.

The impact of the Wests fires stretch across North America, with smoke plumes at the height of wildfire season in the U.S. and Canada sometimes causing unhealthy pollution thousands of miles away on the East Coast.

Last years work by the Forest Service included tree thinning and controlled burns across 5,000 square miles (13,000 square kilometers) of forest nationwide, Vilsack said.

Were very targeted in saying, Heres where we need to go to reduce the risk, Forest Service Deputy Chief Chris French told the AP.

A key piece of the administrations strategy intentionally setting small fires to reduce the amount of vegetation available to burn in a major blaze already has encountered problems: The program was suspended three months last spring after a devastating wildfire sparked by the federal government near Las Vegas, New Mexico, burned across more than 500 square miles (1,295 kilometers) in the southern reaches of the Rocky Mountains.

If youre a community, youre going to have to worry about not just natures fires, but the governments fires, too, said Andy Stahl, executive director of the advocacy group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. New Mexico taught us that.

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Indeed, Feeding America, a nonprofit that supports and connects roughly 60,000 food banks and pantries nationwide, has said that at least half of its members are seeing more demand for their services. And many journalists are reporting about struggling parents waiting in long lines for free food.

We are experts on food and agricultural economics. Together we have created a new data dashboard that tracks U.S. food insecurity the technical term for having trouble getting enough nutritious food based on publicly available information.

The data were collecting ourselves, as well as the information that weve compiled from other sources, including the Census Bureau, isnt yet reflecting a sharp uptick in households without enough to eat. U.S. food insecurity has remained at troubling and yet relatively flat levels.

Based on all the data weve included in our dashboard, we estimate that over the course of 2022 somewhere between 11% and 15% of those living in the U.S. struggled with securing their next meal.

This range relies, in part, on internet-based surveys that can often produce food insecurity estimates that are higher than official government data. Because it is expensive to reach a true random sample of Americans, cheaper online surveys are commonly unrepresentative of the U.S. population but still prove to be a key tool for measuring changes compared with previous online surveys.

The Conversation

Official estimates are delayed and possibly low

Food insecurity is officially assessed based on a series of survey questions developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. Every December, the federal government uses this measure to assess food insecurity for the past year. Following extensive analysis, it releases that data in September of the next year.

The official food insecurity rate hovered around 10.5% from 2019 to 2021, according to the USDA.

During those same three years, however, other researchers detected both lower and much higher rates. Our average of these surveys suggests that national levels may have peaked at nearly 19% in the months following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the U.S. in March 2020.

Within about six months, food insecurity returned to the 10%-11% range, based on our average of available data.

A mismatch between the facts and the coverage

Why are reports of long lines at food banks and increased demand for free food apparently at odds with the relative stability in the national food insecurity rate?

One reason could be that food insecurity rates, which generally overlap with social and economic inequality, can differ sharply.

For example, Nassau County, which spans many of New York Citys largely affluent Long Island suburbs, had a food insecurity rate of 5.7% in 2020. In nearby Bronx County, New York states lowest-income county, the food insecurity rate was more than three times that, at 19.7%, according to Feeding Americas Map the Meal Gap study.

As a result, food security can get worse or better in particular communities without affecting the national rate.

Another explanation could be that government programs and nonprofits that help people get enough food are succeeding. The number of people getting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, sometimes referred to as food stamps and generally just called SNAP, increased by 2.8% from January to October 2022, to 42.3 million.

In some states, SNAP benefits remain at the elevated levels instituted when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Survey data from our Consumer Food Insights reports also shows that the average length of time households receive SNAP benefits increased from 9.5 months to 12.4 months in 2022.

Nearly 7% of households were visiting food pantries in December 2022, according to the Census Bureau, up from 4.4% in 2019. At the same time, the USDA announced an additional US$2 billion in funding to emergency food providers to deal with elevated food costs.

The charitable food system is decentralized, making it hard if not impossible to determine whether the amount of food donated to Americans overall has changed. As Feeding America reports, the 2.5 billion meals that its network provided in the first half of 2022 came from a range of donors, with its corporate partners playing a big role.

The data further suggests that, while consumer confidence about the overall economy is at a historically low level, fears of an economic downturn dont reflect the fact that many people still have more money saved up than they did before 2020. Similarly, unemployment, which dipped to 3.5% in December 2022, is at the historically low levels last seen before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, researchers have found that incomes over time and accumulated savings are more closely tied to whether families will experience food insecurity than what their breadwinners currently earn. Because the disposable incomes of many Americans rose in 2020 and 2021, it will probably take a deeper economic shock than the nearly 12% increase in grocery prices registered between December 2021 and December 2022 to make food insecurity soar.

Getting clearer pictures

To be clear, we do not mean to suggest that food insecurity is not a serious issue or that having more than 1 in 10 Americans struggle to get enough to eat is acceptable.

Rather, we noticed that policy and research interest in food insecurity spiked in the year following COVID-19 shutdowns, resulting in much more data on the topic before dwindling in 2021. Today, the public is paying more attention to the topic again.

Food banks and SNAP benefits collectively have provided around $130 billion in annual economic relief for low-income Americans in recent years, a number that includes a sharp increase in benefits. We believe that these efforts are vital.

We propose that conducting and releasing more frequent high-quality surveys would help bring sustained attention to the issue, clarify trends and allow experts like us to make better predictions.

And because all food insecurity surveys are subject to sampling errors and offer only a snapshot regarding a single time frame, we believe that pooling the multiple surveys featured in our data dashboard can better inform policymakers and charities that seek to address food insecurity and rapidly respond when levels spike.

Sam Polzin is Food and Agriculture Survey Scientist, Purdue University and Jayson Lusk, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As early as last summer, Ukrainian officials began expressing concern that dwindling media attention towards the war could lead to a loss of Western support. But between the Kremlins threats of further energy supply cuts and nuclear escalation, the world shouldnt cast their eyes away from what is happening in Ukraine, as the direction the war takes could be a pivotal moment for the next century, according to the head of one of the worlds largest banks.

The only thing that matters for the future of the world is how this thing plays out, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Thursday in an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

Dimon said that a potential U.S. recession in 2023which he has gone from describing as a potentially devastating hurricane to a comparably mild downturn over the past yearis a justified concern for most Americans, but he is more worried about the war in Ukraine and the repercussions it has for the world.

The real issue for the world is Russia, war, Ukraine, energy, trade, and that is serious. Thats still out there. Hopefully it will all mitigate and go away but it may not, he said. The other stuff is the weather.

Nuclear blackmail

Jamie Dimon knows something about the wars global repercussions, given the devastating effect the conflict has had on supply chains, trade, and financial markets worldwide. 

The invasion, subsequent sanctions, and Russias move to limit energy sales to the West created a global energy and food supply crunch last year. The Federal Reserve noted in May of last year that the war represented a drag on the global economy that was pushing up inflation in the U.S. and elsewhere. And in June, the World Bank warned that the war was amplifying the risk of a major recession and stagflation in developing countries and nations with a high economic exposure to Russia.

Despite the harm to the global economy, the prospect of a prolonged war is now more real than ever. With the Ukraine War falling into a stalemate and going on much longer than Russian President Vladimir Putin had planned, Putin and his allies have not shied away from increasingly escalatory actions and rhetoric.

Of particular concern to Ukraine and Western officials has been nuclear saber-rattling from Putin. Last month, he warned the world there was an increasing threat of nuclear warfare and even suggested he was prepared to do away with Russias no first use military doctrine when it came to nuclear weapons. 

On Thursday, former Russian president and close Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev sought to deter more Western involvement in the war with a warning: The defeat of Russiawhich possesses nearly 6,000 nuclear warheadsin Ukraine could trigger a nuclear war.

The Pentagon has so far maintained that there is little indication Putin is planning a nuclear strike, although U.S. officials have raised concerns over the potential for nuclear escalation should the tide of war continue turning against Russia.

Former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger made a similar point in a December op-ed published in The Spectator, where he argued that Russias global nuclear reach would not be diminished by its recent military setbacks in Ukraine, and that escalatory threats should be taken seriously.

Its nuclear blackmail, Dimon told CNBC of Russias military incursions and escalating threats. 

Dimon said that the trajectory of the war will be pivotal in determining what the world will be like in the future, and much depends on whether the U.S. and the EU continue backing Ukraine with military weapons and tactical assistance. 

Despite Putins nuclear threats and the cost of the war, the West has so far shown no signs of retracting its support for Ukraine. As of this week, Germany and the U.K. are willing to contribute heavy battle tanks that Ukrainian military officials have been pleading for since last year, while the New York Times reported Wednesday that U.S. officials are warming to the idea of sending military support to help Ukraine retake Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed in 2014.

This is the most serious issue and in my view could be an inflection point for the Western world for a hundred years, Dimon said. Do we get our act together to help win this war, help the Ukrainians, help rebuild Ukraine?

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