Attributing Increases in Fire Weather to Anthropogenic Climate Change Over France

Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia

“…Future climate-driven changes in fire risk Australia's unprecedented Black Summer may be evidence that the intensification of forest fires in southeast Australia as an expected consequence of human-caused climate change has now become observable 15,18,78,79 . The relationship between fire and climate is complex because it involves multiple, interacting processes 80 , and the occurrence of large and extreme fires depends on alignment of climatic and non-climatic conditions (Box 1). Global fire-vegetation models have the potential in the future to allow for assessments of changing fire risk within the complexity of the Earth system, however, these models are currently limited in their ability to simulate the size of historical fires, the length of the fire season and interannual variations in burnt area 81 .…”

Human-driven greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions cause distinct regional impacts on extreme fire weather

“…Likewise, anthropogenic forcing increased fire risk by 30% during the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires 10 , which caused tens of fatalities and thousands of lost homes 11 . In Southern Europe, the extreme fire season witnessed in 2003 was 50 times more likely in today’s climate compared to a world without anthropogenic climate change 12 . By mid-2020, the Siberian tundra had already experienced a more severe fire season than the previous record-breaking year under extreme heat conditions attributed to anthropogenic climate change, and the Amazon rainforest was predicted to exceed 2019’s record number of observed fires.…”

Editorial: Climate, Land Use, and Fire: Can Models Inform Management?

“…As rapid climate change alters disturbance regime limiting the usefulness of looking back at previous behaviors and likely overwhelming current land management strategies, they emphasize the critical need for collaboration between modelers and field ecologists to integrate local knowledge that describes emerging novel ecosystems. Barbero et al (2020) quantified changes in fire weather conditions including extreme fire seasons imparted by anthropogenic climate change over France. Using counterfactual simulations that excluded first-order estimates of modeled changes in climate, they estimated that 47-72% of the observed trends in various fire weather indices across Mediterranean France during 1958-2017 were attributable to anthropogenic climate change.…”

“…Since fuels reduction is a hot topic issue and is often brandished as the one size fits all solution to the extreme fire behavior, we highlight two articles (Clarke et al, 2020;O'Connor et al, 2020) that show the importance of fuels reduction in one dryland ecosystem and the only short term success in another. A second grouping of studies highlighted the various ways in which modeling can more broadly inform management decisions, including a review of various modeling efforts to help managers assess and address ecosystem stability (Loehman et al, 2020), the identification of non-stationarity in extreme fire seasons that emphasizes the need for modernizing fire risk approaches (Barbero et al, 2020), and the importance of ecosystem threshold behavior in savanna ecosystems to changing fire frequency that will require agile models forecasting such drastic change in conditions (Gomes et al, 2020). Two final papers highlight next steps for the fire modeling community: the well known goal of improving earth system models that are used to simulate future climate and could be used to assess the climate mitigation potential of fire management to inform international policy (D'Onofrio et al, 2020); the potential of linking fire regime characteristics with fire management decisions in modeling efforts to create more useful tools to address the challenges ahead (Taylor 2020).…”