Fire risk assessment should take into account the most relevant components associated to fire occurrence. To estimate when and where the fire will produce undesired effects, we need to model both (a) fire ignition and propagation potential and (b) fire vulnerability. Following these ideas, a comprehensive fire risk assessment system is proposed in this paper, which makes extensive use of geographic information technologies to offer a spatially explicit evaluation of fire risk conditions. The paper first describes the conceptual model, then the methods to generate the different input variables, the approaches to merge those variables into synthetic risk indices and finally the validation of the outputs. The model has been applied at a national level for the whole Spanish Iberian territory at 1-km2 spatial resolution. Fire danger included human factors, lightning probability, fuel moisture content of both dead and live fuels and propagation potential. Fire vulnerability was assessed by analysing values-at-risk and landscape resilience. Each input variable included a particular accuracy assessment, whereas the synthetic indices were validated using the most recent fire statistics available. Significant relations (P < 0.001) with fire occurrence were found for the main synthetic danger indices, particularly for those associated to fuel moisture content conditions.
Aim
This paper presents a map of global fire vulnerability, estimating the potential damage of wildland fires to global ecosystems.
Location
Global scale at 0.5° grid resolution.
Methods
Three vulnerability factors were considered: ecological richness and fragility, provision of ecosystem services and value of houses in the wildland–urban interface. Each of these factors was estimated from existing global databases. Ecological values were estimated from biodiversity relevance, conservation status and fragmentation based on Olson's ecoregions. The ecological regeneration delay was estimated from adaptation to fires and soil erosion potential. The former was assessed by comparing actual land cover with fire‐off simulations based on a dynamic global vegetation model (ORCHIDEE). The annual loss of ecosystem services was estimated with values transferred from other studies and loss coefficients. This was integrated throughout time by considering the regeneration delay. Value of houses was estimated at country level according to the market prices of real‐estate and land, the level of economic development and the population density. Economic and ecological evaluations were merged through cross‐tabulation logic to obtain qualitative ranks of fire vulnerability.
Results
The most vulnerable areas were found to be the rain forest of the Amazon Basin, Central Africa and Southeast Asia, the temperate forest of Europe, South America and north‐east America, and the ecological corridors of Central America and Southeast Asia. The lowest vulnerability was observed in boreal regions, particularly those already affected by fires or having low biodiversity, agricultural regions of Australia, India, Latin America and Central Asia.
Main conclusions
This is the first attempt to produce a map of global fire vulnerability, based on a wide variety of factors related to the impacts of fire on ecological and socio‐economic values. This product will help current efforts to model future scenarios of the impacts of biomass burning for different climate and land‐use scenarios.
In the framework of recent international climate negotiations, industrialised countries have committed to transfer at least USD 100 billion per year to developing countries from 2020. Climate finance has become the subject of an already extensive literature. However, the economic impact of the disbursement of climate finance and the role of international trade in its distribution globally have not been studied yet. This paper specifically estimates the geographical distribution of economic benefits for 17 mitigation and 9 adaptation options. We use a Global Multi-Regional Input-Output framework to track both domestic as well as spill-over effects of climate finance disbursements. The relevance of spill-overs is confirmed: on average, 29% of the economic benefits of climate actions flow to countries different from the recipient country (i.e. to the donors and third countries). But this percentage varies widely, between 11 and 61 % depending on the type of climate action implemented as well as the recipient country. The findings are expected to be of interest for both recipient and donor countries as they provide guidance on how to maximize the economic co-benefits of climate finance.
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