Study: Climate Change Will Alter Risks of Wildfire Worldwide

Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world, with some regions such as the western United States seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to climate scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and Texas Tech University.

By the end of the century, almost all of North America and most of Europe are projected to see a jump in wildfire frequency, primarily because of increasing temperatures. At the same time, fire activity could decrease around equatorial regions because of increased rainfall, particularly among tropical rainforests.

“In the long run, we found what most fear — increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet,” said lead author Max Moritz, a fire specialist based at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising.”

Researchers used 16 climate change models to generate one of the most comprehensive projections of how climate change might affect global fire patterns.

The study was published in June in Ecosphere, a peer-reviewed journal of the Ecological Society of America.

The projections emphasize that it is important for experts in conservation and urban development to include fire in long-term planning and risk analysis, Moritz said.

Researchers combined more than a decade of satellite-based fire records with historical climate observations and model simulations of future change. The authors documented gradients between fire-prone and fire-free areas of Earth, and quantified the environmental factors responsible for the patterns. They then simulated how climate change would drive future fire activity.

The study saw the greatest disagreements among models regarding the next few decades, with uncertainty across more than half the planet about whether fire activity will increase or decrease. Yet climate models agreed that some regions such as the western United States should brace themselves for more fire.

The models focused on fire frequencies, so linking these to other models of fire intensity and vegetation change are important next steps, researchers said.

“Our ability to model fire activity is improving,” Moritz said. “A more basic challenge now is learning to coexist with fire itself.”

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Science Foundation and The Nature Conservancy helped support the study.