Global wildfires on a changing planet

Abstract

The distribution of wildfires on Earth will change as future climates, land-use, and vegetation change. We use global empirical models of burnt area, fire size and fire intensity to explore alternative trajectories of wildfires in a changing world. Even with ambitious climate-change mitigation, we find a change in wildfire patterns by the end of the 21st century with generally reduced burning in tropical regions but larger and more intense wildfires in extra-tropical regions. With low mitigation, burnt area increases greatly across all vegetation types – overwhelming the declining trend that currently dominates the global signal. These findings suggest that even with high climate-change mitigation, current fire-suppression policies will no longer be effective in much of the world. A move towards integrated fire management, led by regional stakeholders, will be inescapable. Moreover, mitigation scenarios that rely on expanding forest area will be unrealistic unless they are designed with wildfire risks in mind.