GLOBAL: Climate change to fan wild fire shifts

The advance of climate change will bring not only higher temperatures but also rapid changes in the distribution of wild fires, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at Texas Tech University, shows.

The researchers, whose report is published in PLoS ONE, a journal of the Public Library of Science, used 10 years of satellite data to plot where wild fires occurred around the world and determine common risk factors. The scientists then considered models for climate change and how that change might impact on wild fires.

They concluded that large-scale changes in wild fire distribution would happen surprisingly quickly. Wild fires would also become more common during the next 40 years in Scandinavia and northern Russia, parts of the western United States and the Tibetan plateau, while northeast China and central Africa might become less fire-prone.

The model predicted Australia, subject to devastating fires in recent months, would generally be at less risk of wild fires in future.

One of the study's authors, Max Moritz, assistant cooperative extension specialist in wildland fire at UC Berkeley's college of natural resources and co-director of the UC Center for Fire Research and Outreach, said the research was the first attempt to quantitatively model why fire occurred in different places around the globe.

"What is startling in these findings is the relatively rapid rate at which we're likely to see very broad-scale changes in fire activity for large parts of the planet."

Moritz said fires needed sufficient vegetation to burn and a period when conditions were hot and dry enough for ignition to happen. When the researchers used those environmental relationships and future climate projections to look at how these factors might change over time, under lower and mid-range emissions scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they found that much of the world would see changes in fire activity.

The researchers said reliable predictions for specific regions would require incorporating a broader suite of climate models and accounting for specific regional factors that may influence fire in those locations. But they said the overall scope of the shift was likely to remain unchanged.

"Fire patterns are going to change and we need to start thinking about what that means for ecosystems, and what our response should be," said the paper's lead author, Meg Krawchuk, a UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and by Canada's National Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

"A large decrease in fire activity is not necessarily a good thing for an ecosystem that has adapted to periodic wildfires," she said. "Some species of trees rely upon fires occurring at specific times to regenerate, for example, so changes in a fire regime have the potential to dramatically alter the landscape over time."

The University of California, Berkeley's original release on this subject, including a map showing changes in wild fire occurrence is here.