The year 2020 had the most catastrophic fire season over the last two decades in the Pantanal, which led to outstanding environmental impacts. Indeed, much of the Pantanal has been affected by severe dry conditions since 2019, with evidence of the 2020’s drought being the most extreme and widespread ever recorded in the last 70 years. Although it is unquestionable that this mega-drought contributed significantly to the increase of fire risk, so far, the 2020’s fire season has been analyzed at the univariate level of a single climate event, not considering the co-occurrence of extreme and persistent temperatures with soil dryness conditions. Here, we show that similarly to other areas of the globe, the influence of land-atmosphere feedbacks contributed decisively to the simultaneous occurrence of dry and hot spells (HPs), exacerbating fire risk. The ideal synoptic conditions for strong atmospheric heating and large evaporation rates were present, in particular during the HPs, when the maximum temperature was, on average, 6 ºC above the normal. The short span of the period during those compound drought-heatwave (CDHW) events accounted for 55% of the burned area of 2020. The vulnerability in the northern forested areas was higher than in the other areas, revealing a synergistic effect between fuel availability and weather-hydrological conditions. Accordingly, where fuel is not a limiting factor, fire activity tends to be more modelled by CDHW events. Our work advances beyond an isolated event-level basis towards a compound and cascading natural hazards approach, simultaneously estimating the contribution of drought and heatwaves to fuelling extreme fire outbreaks in the Pantanal such as those in 2020. Thus, these findings are relevant within a broader context, as the driving mechanisms apply across other ecosystems, implying higher flammability conditions and further efforts for monitoring and predicting such extreme events.

A significant fraction of Brazil's population has been exposed to drought in recent years, a situation that is expected to worsen in frequency and intensity due to climate change. This constitutes a current key environmental health concern, especially in densely urban areas such as several big cities and suburbs. For the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the short‐term drought effects on weekly non‐external, circulatory, and respiratory mortality was conducted in 13 major Brazilian macro‐urban areas across 2000–2019. We applied quasi‐Poisson regression models adjusted by temperature to explore the association between drought (defined by the Standardized Precipitation‐Evapotranspiration Index) and the different mortality causes by location, sex, and age groups. We next conducted multivariate meta‐analytical models separated by cause and population groups to pool individual estimates. Impact measures were expressed as the attributable fractions among the exposed population, from the relative risks (RRs). Overall, a positive association between drought exposure and mortality was evidenced in the total population, with RRs varying from 1.003 [95% CI: 0.999–1.007] to 1.010 [0.996–1.025] for non‐external mortality related to moderate and extreme drought conditions, from 1.002 [0.997–1.007] to 1.008 [0.991–1.026] for circulatory mortality, and from 1.004 [0.995–1.013] to 1.013 [0.983–1.044] for respiratory mortality. Females, children, and the elderly population were the most affected groups, for whom a robust positive association was found. The study also revealed high heterogeneity between locations. We suggest that policies and action plans should pay special attention to vulnerable populations to promote efficient measures to reduce vulnerability and risks associated with droughts.

No abstract

<p>The year of 2020 was characterised by an unprecedented fire season in Pantanal, the largest continuous tropical wetland, located in south-western Brazil. This event was the largest ever recorded over, at least, the last two decades, reaching an amount of 3.9 million ha and affecting 17 million vertebrates<sup>1,2</sup>. Recent evidence points out that this event resulted from a complex interplay between human, landscape, and meteorological factors<sup>3,4</sup>. Indeed, much of the Pantanal has been affected by severe dry conditions since 2019, with 2020’s drought being the most extreme and widespread ever recorded in the last 70 years<sup>5,6</sup>. The drought condition was maintained at record levels during most of the year of 2021, following the climate change scenarios expected for this region<sup>7</sup>. Prior to this comprehensive assessment, the 2020’s fire season has been analyzed at the univariate level of a single climate event, not considering the co-occurrence of extreme and persistent temperatures with soil dryness conditions. Here, we show that the influence of land–atmosphere feedbacks contributed decisively to the simultaneous occurrence of dry and hot spells, exacerbating fire risk. These hot spells, with maximum temperatures 6 ºC above-average were associated with the prevalence of the ideal synoptic conditions for strong atmospheric heating, large evaporation rates and precipitation deficits<sup>4</sup>. We stress that more than half of the burned area during the fire season occurred during compound drought-heatwave conditions. The synergistic effect between fuel availability and weather-hydrological conditions was particularly acute in the vulnerable northern forested areas. These findings are relevant for integrated fire management in the Pantanal as well as within a broader context, as the driving mechanisms apply across other ecosystems, implying further efforts for monitoring and predicting such extreme events.</p><p> </p><p>References</p><p>[1] Garcia, L.C, et al.. Record-breaking wildfires in the world’s largest continuous tropical wetland: Integrative fire management is urgently needed for both biodiversity and humans. J. Environ. Manage. 2021, 293, 112870.</p><p>[2] Tomas, W. M., et al. Counting the dead: 17 million vertebrates directly killed by the 2020’s wildfires in the Pantanal wetland, Brazil. Sci. Rep. accepted.</p><p>[3] Libonati, R.; et al. Rescue Brazil’s burning Pantanal wetlands. Nature. 2020, 588, 217–219.</p><p>[4] Libonati, R., et al. Assessing the role of compound drought and heatwave events on unprecedented 2020 wildfires in the Pantanal. Environmental Research Letters. 2022, 17, 1.</p><p>[5] Thielen, D., et al. The Pantanal under Siege—On the Origin, Dynamics and Forecast of the Megadrought Severely Affecting the Largest Wetland in the World. Water. 2021, 13(21), 3034.</p><p>[6] Marengo, J.A., et al. Extreme Drought in the Brazilian Pantanal in 2019–2020: Characterization, Causes, and Impacts. Front. Water. 2021, 0, 13.</p><p>[7] Gomes, G.D.; et al.. Projections of subcontinental changes in seasonal precipitation over the two major river basins in South America under an extreme climate scenario. Clim. Dyn. 2021, 1-23.</p><p><em> </em></p><p><em>This work </em><em>was supported by </em><em>Project Rede Pantanal from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations of Brazil (FINEP grant 01.20.0201.00). R.L. was supported by CNPq [grant 305159/2018–6] and FAPERJ [grant E26/202.714/2019]</em></p>

No abstract

<p>Forest fires are a global phenomenon with severe and destructive impacts at the ecological, environmental, socio-economic and health levels. Portugal, like all Mediterranean Europe, is recurrently affected by large wildfires, particularly intensive during the summers of 2003, 2005 and 2017. The latter is remembered because of the 500 000 hectares of burned area and the at least 116 deaths in the fire season.</p> <p>CeaseFire is a website that aims at converting the scientific knowledge produced at universities and research institutes into useful and user-friendly tools that provide information on fire activity and meteorological fire danger tailored to the needs of the fire community in Portugal and assist in decision making on fire management and combat and on fire damage mitigation. The website, relying on information from the LSA SAF project, provides maps and data of (1) components of the Fire Weather Index System;(2) Fire Radiative Power (FRP) released by wildfires (3) classes of meteorological fire danger, ignition potential and aftermath; (4) outlooks of the fire season severity; and (5) prescribed burned classes. The site has been sponsored by <em>The Navigator Company</em>, a leading force in the global pulp and paper market since the operational start of the website in 2016. The number of registered users has increased up to more than 1 600 within the fire community, comprising firemen, civil protection officers, municipalities, academic researchers and private owners. In recent years <em>E-Redes</em>, a national electricity distribution utility service, has also been supporting the development of the website.</p> <p>CeaseFire is sufficiently flexible to include other tools and be implemented in other regions. In this context, the feedback provided by users and companies has been decisive to improve the tools and products, and extend the site to other geographical areas, namely the Zambezia province in Mozambique and, more recently, the Brazilian Pantanal.</p> <p>Research work was funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) I.P./MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC) IDL (UIDB/50019/2020), project FIRECAST (PCIF/GRF/0204/2017) and by EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF).</p>

<p>The devastating fires that in 2020 burned more than 3.9 million hectares in the Brazilian Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world, were the result of a complex interplay among human activity, landscape characteristics, and meteorological conditions, and have deepened the concerns about the future of that unique region of the world.</p><p>The meteorological component has played a prominent role in 2020, Pantanal having been affected by the most extreme drought since 1950 and by long periods of extremely high temperature. Both factors, combined with fire ignitions, mostly related to human activities, have contributed to the onset of large fire events that spread over water-stressed vegetation.</p><p>The aim of the present work is to set up a statistical model that is able to provide reliable forecast of probability of occurrence of a wildfire, taking into consideration both the longer and shorter effects of atmospheric conditions on vegetation stress and, provided an ignition has occurred, on the building up and spreading of a wildfire.</p><p>Fire data cover the period 2001-2020 and consist of Fire Radiative Power (FRP) as acquired by the MODIS instrument on-board Aqua and Terra Satellites. Meteorological fire danger was characterized by the Fire Weather (FWI) data covering the same period from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service.</p><p>Statistical models used in this study combine a lognormal distribution central body with a lower and an upper tail, both consisting of Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions, and daily FWI is used as a covariate of the parameters of the lognormal and the two GP distributions. First a base model (with fixed parameters) is fitted to the decimal logarithm of FRP, and the quality of fit is assessed using an Anderson-Darling test. Then the model is improved using FWI as a covariate, and performances of models without and with covariate are compared by computing the Bayes Factor as well as by applying the Vuong’s closeness test.</p><p>Statistical models were developed for the nine hydrological subregions of Pantanal using data for the period 2001-2019. Five classes of meteorological fire danger were then defined based on probabilities of exceedance of predefined values of FRP. The procedure was then separately applied to the extreme year of 2020.</p><p>The developed procedure is on the basis of an operational early warning system of fire danger in Pantanal that is currently being set up.</p><p> </p><p><em>This work was supported by national funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal) under project FIRECAST (PCIF/GRF/0204/2017), and by the State Public Prosecutor's Office of Mato Grosso do Sul.</em></p>

Este trabalho estuda a variação da temperatura da superfície continental (TSC) associada à alteração da cobertura e do uso do solo, apoiados nos índices de vegetação por diferença normalizada (NDVI) e de área construída (IBI) para a região de instalação do COMPERJ. Desta forma, utilizou-se uma série temporal de imagens de 12 anos provenientes dos satélites Landsat-5, 7 e 8, referente aos anos de 2002 a 2013, subdivididos em dois grupos, anterior (2002 a 2007) e posterior (2008 a 2013) à construção do COMPERJ, totalizando 58 imagens. Dois mapas de uso do solo foram confeccionados, um para cada período, levando em conta as classes urbano, solo, vegetação e água. Posteriormente, a TSC foi relacionada com cada índice, mostrando que a TSC é inversamente (diretamente) proporcional ao NDVI (IBI). A maior correlação absoluta para o período pós-construção (R = 0,85) foi obtida com o IBI, indicando que este índice pode funcionar como uma métrica adicional para análise dos padrões térmicos urbanos. Uma caracterização (média e desvio padrão) dos parâmetros TSC, NDVI e IBI de acordo com cada classe de uso do solo para o período pré-construção e pós-construção também foi realizada, onde para o período pré-construção (pós-construção) a diferença de TSC entre a área do COMPERJ (urbano) e área de vegetação foi de 1,9°C (3,2°C). A diferença entre esses dois valores mostra uma intensificação de 1,3°C entre os dois períodos. O IBI (NDVI) aumentou (diminuiu) seu valor de -0,16 para 0,05 (0,49 para 0,15). Finalmente, utilizou-se o índice M de separabilidade para analisar a distinção dos parâmetros entre as diferentes classes. Para o período pré-construção, todos os parâmetros mostraram valores de M < 1, enquanto que após a construção todos os parâmetros apresentam M próximo a 1. Palavras-chave: ilha de calor urbana; COMPERJ; temperatura da superfície continental; NDVI; IBI