Dr Douglas Kelley, a Land Surface Modeller at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, is among several international experts to contribute to a new major report on fire science. Here, he explains why wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity across the world and the role that researchers are playing in helping to reduce their future impacts…
Wildfires have always been a natural part of many ecosystems, but there has been a worrying rise in extremely dangerous wildfire events in recent years. These fires are happening more often, are more intense, and are spreading into more areas than ever before. It's really important for us to understand and deal with this growing threat in order to protect the environment and our communities.
To respond to the increasing frequency and severity of these wildfires, a group of 37 scientists, fire experts and artists from 14 countries have put together a report called FLARE (Fire Science Learning Across the Earth System). The report looks at three big challenges for understanding and dealing with fires, and suggests a way forward for tackling them:
- learning about how extremely intense fires work and impact people.
- understanding how fires affect green house gas emissions and the environment, including how emissions, smoke and pollution can move around the earth and affect our rivers, oceans, snow and ice, agriculture and vegetation.
- predicting the impact of human activities on the behaviour of fires, and fires on human behaviour.
These challenges are all connected, and each one plays a part in either causing severe wildfire events or affecting their impacts.
Defining an extreme wildfire event is difficult. Even if a fire only burns over a small area, it can still have negative impacts on nature and people. Fire in remote areas, particularly with more woodland that can burn, tends to be bigger and release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Alarming trends
Extreme wildfires are becoming worse. They occur more often and are getting more intense in places like California, Australia, and the Mediterranean. The fire season in the western United States now lasts longer than it did a few decades ago, and last year, Canadian fires were so bad that 200,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes. Many of the worst fires started a whole month before the usual fire season.
Fires are also happening in areas that weren't as prone to wildfires before, like the Arctic tundra and parts of northern Europe. More fires are at the edge of cities and wild areas, which damage properties and infrastructure and can cause injuries and deaths.
These fires also have significant negative impacts on nature because fire damage to soils and vegetation makes it harder for plants and animals to survive and thrive.
Damage to ‘watersheds’ – the area of land that drains into rivers – affects their ability to retain water, which can sometimes lead to flooding the next time heavy rains come. Fighting these big fires and fixing the damage they cause costs a lot of money. There is also an increase in health problems when the air gets dirty from big fires, which can effect people up to thousands of kilometres away from the fires.
While predicting the exact location and timing of the next extreme fire is not yet possible, there is a consensus that we will see a persistent rise in both the frequency of fire events in many regions and their impacts in the coming years.
Warmer weather and changes in rain patterns from climate change are drying out plants and making them easier to catch fire, and causing longer dry times.
People are making the problem worse, too. We're building more cities and cutting down more trees, which, in some places, make fires spread more easily. Whilst in other areas, we haven't been letting fires burn in some places for a long time, so there is plenty of vegetation that acts as fuel for the fires, making them larger and more intense More people are living in places where fires are likely, and we're not taking care of the forests as well as we could.
Need for proactive approaches
The extreme fires that now seem to be increasing every year, leave scientists struggling to answer critical questions posed by policymakers, media, and the public:
- How much of the burning was due to climate change?
- Was it caused by human activities?
- What are the impacts?
- Will this happen again?
Traditionally, fire science has been reactive, often initiated by significant fire events, necessitating a shift from reactive to proactive fire science.
While improving, our current tools and models often need to be equipped to provide rapid, accurate answers when they are most needed.
To better address these challenges, we must develop and deploy tools that can offer rapid answers during extreme fire events. This includes improving our ability to measure and communicate uncertainties effectively to the public. Despite the inherent uncertainties in fire science and real-time data, these need to be quantified and conveyed transparently.
Anticipating the future of extreme fire events is vital for effective adaptation. To address this, we need to identify fundamental questions posed by society and report key metrics, such as emissions and attribution of the causes of fire, early. This proactive stance also involves early communication of patterns associated with phenomena like El Niño, enabling communities to prepare adequately.
The fire science community can play a pivotal role in providing answers to the critical questions that emerge following wildfires by collaborating with grassroots organisations, urban and emergency planners and firefighters to provide the information they need for effective decision making. This includes short-term fire weather forecasts, long-term climate trends and predictions of the impact of human activities on fire dynamics.
As the fire science community grapples with increased demand and complexity, building capacity and fostering a collective will to embrace challenges are crucial for achieving sustained progress. By working together, we can better understand, manage, and mitigate the impacts of fire on ecosystems and societies, ultimately ensuring a resilient and well-prepared global response to the changing dynamics of fire regimes.
Further information
The FLARE report is available at zenodo.org/records/12634068
Dr Douglas Kelley’s involvement in the study was funded as part of National Capability for International science for net zero plus and LTSM2 TerraFIRMA projects.