Forest fires: climate change

Endorsed by

DRMKC

Motivation

Understanding how future changes in climate will affect forest fires and associated emissions of greenhouse gases, in Europe and globally, is important to determine adaptation and potential of forests.

Potential Solutions

Following solutions could be addressing this gap.

Climate affects forest fires directly, by way of the weather during fire ignition and propagation, and indirectly through its effects on vegetation and fuels. Climate change projections for this century in the southern countries of the EU anticipate an increase in temperature that exceeds the global average, as well as a reduction in rainfall. Moreover, extreme temperature events and droughts are also projected to increase. Understanding how future changes in climate will affect forest fires and associated emissions of greenhouse gases, in Europe and globally, is important to determine adaptation and potential of forests. In addition, ecosystem to fire under extreme meteorological conditions is not well known.

Rationale & related CM function(s)

Fire risk models based on climate scenarios need to incorporate other factors such as landscape fragmentation, spatial distribution of ignition and suppression capacities to make them more realistic.

Develop mechanistic approaches that explicitly consider the processes by which vegetation changes derived from climate influence fire regimes.

Improve the knowledge on how ecosystems in current non fire-prone regions can become affected by new fire regimes

Provenance

DRKMC gaps explorer: Forest Fires/Climate Change

Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.