With Europe living through one of its worst years for wildfires, a new study warns that climate change could dramatically increase the extent of burned land.
The research team examined two scenarios for carbon emissions through the end of the century. In the optimistic scenario, where global average temperature exceeds pre-industrial levels by 1.8 degrees Celsius, burned areas in Europe would increase by 39%.
In the pessimistic scenario, with temperatures rising by 3.6 degrees, burned areas would increase by 2.92 times, researchers report in the journal Global Change Biology.
According to the latest UN estimates, current government commitments to cut carbon emissions would lead to a temperature rise of 2.8 degrees by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels, landing somewhere between the two scenarios examined in the study.
“Climate change is increasing fire activity across Europe, as conditions of high temperatures, drought, and strong winds become more intense,” said Matthias Forkel of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the study’s lead author.
The increase in burned areas, he noted, would most affect regions “around the Mediterranean and across much of Western and Central Europe, including areas that have so far seen relatively few fires.”
A disproportionate increase
Forkel’s team used computer models to estimate the increase in burned area relative to the 2000-2030 reference period. The increase isn’t linear: as conditions grow hotter and drier, burned areas rise disproportionately rather than climbing by a fixed amount for each degree of warming.
The study also used a second computer model to estimate how much burned area could be limited through fire prevention and suppression measures.
The model showed that further improvements in fire management could cut burned areas by 92% in a future with 1.8 degrees of warming, and by 72% if warming reaches 3.6 degrees by the end of the century.
Even so, the authors warned the results may be overly optimistic about how effective fire management can be in a much hotter climate.
“We’re seeing that fire-prone conditions are worsening, so we need to increase investment,” said Thomas Hickler of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre.
“If Europe increases investment in forest fire management, in firefighter training, proper equipment, good coordination, and more, our projections show that can make a significant difference. But if fires become truly extreme, our ability to contain them could collapse, and we don’t yet know where that tipping point lies,” he stressed.
The study arrives amid a particularly bad year for wildfires in the EU. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), roughly 5.5 million acres had burned as of August 12, a figure 2.5 times higher than the average of the past 20 years.
