Climate Change and Fire

Climate change poses a grave threat to human health with disparate impacts across society. While populations with high social vulnerability generally bear a larger burden of exposure to and impact from environmental hazards; such patterns and trends are less explored at the confluence of social vulnerability and rural–urban gradients.

Aim: Increasing aridity has driven widespread synchronous fire occurrence in recent decades across North America. The lack of historical (pre-1880) fire records limits our ability to understand long-term continental fire-climate dynamics.

Background: Wildfire simulation models are used to derive maps of burn probability (BP) based on fuels, weather, topography and ignition locations, and BP maps are key components of wildfire risk assessments.

As climate warms, trees are expected to track their ideal climate, referred to as ‘range shifts’; however, lags in tree range shifts are currently common.

Canada has experienced more-intense and longer fire seasons with more-frequent uncontrollable wildfires over the past decades. However, the effect of these changes remains unknown. This study identifies driving forces of burn severity and estimates its spatiotemporal variations in Canadian forests.

Background: Climate change is a strong contributing factor in the lengthening and intensification of wildfire seasons, with warmer and often drier conditions associated with increasingly severe impacts.

Background

In this review, we discuss current research on forest carbon risk from natural disturbance under climate change for the United States, with emphasis on advancements in analytical mapping and modeling tools that have potential to drive research for managing future long-term stability of forest carbon.

In 2023, wildfires burned 15 million hectares in Canada, more than doubling the previous record. These wildfires caused a record number of evacuations, unprecedented air quality impacts across Canada and the northeastern United States, and substantial strain on fire management resources.

Fire and drought are expected to increase in frequency and severity in temperate forests due to climate change. To evaluate whether drought increases the likelihood of post-fire tree mortality, we used a large database of tree survival and mortality from 32 years of wildland fires covering four dominant western North American conifers.