Climate Change and Fire

Minimizing negative impacts of climate change on human and natural systems requires mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to new climate conditions. Forestry provides grounds to study the relationship between these two concepts: carbon flux and storage are ecosystem services of forests, while forests are growing increasingly vulnerable to climate-driven disturbances.

The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity.

The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity, spanning from mid-April to late October and across much of the forested regions of Canada. Here, we summarize the main causes and impacts of this exceptional season.

Introduction: Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme single-day fire spread events, with major ecological and social implications.

The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations.

Climate change contributes to the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires globally, with significant impacts on society and the environment. However, our understanding of the global distribution of extreme fires remains skewed, primarily influenced by media coverage and regionalised research efforts.

Better understanding how fires respond to climate variability is an issue of current interest in light of ongoing climate change. However, evaluating the global-scale temporal variability of fires in response to climate presents a challenge due to the intricate processes at play and the limitation of fire data.

To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the northwestern US.

As wildfire activity increases and fire-size distributions potentially shift in many forested regions worldwide, anticipating the spatial patterns of burn severity expected with future fire activity is critical for ecological understanding and informing management and policy.

Background