Wildfires on a changing planet.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41680129.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-68176-4 and PMC identifier 12905353.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The distribution of wildfires on Earth will change as climate, land-use, and vegetation change. We use global empirical models of burnt area, fire size and fire intensity to explore future wildfire trajectories under ~1.5 and 3-4 °C warming with middle of the road future socio-economic conditions. Even under ~1.5 °C warming we find a change in wildfire patterns by the end of the 21<sup>st</sup> century with reduced burning in tropical regions driven by changes in human activity but larger and more intense wildfires in extra-tropical regions driven by changes in climate and CO<sub>2</sub>. With low climate change mitigation, burnt areas increase greatly across all vegetation types, overwhelming the current global decline. These findings suggest that even with ambitious climate change mitigation, current fire-suppression policies will fail in much of the world and mitigation scenarios that rely on expanding forest areas will be unrealistic unless they are designed with wildfire risks in mind.