Development of a Model to Estimate the Risk of Emission of Greenhouse Gases from Forest Fires

Abstract

While the Mediterranean basin is foreseen to be highly affected by climate change (CC) and severe forest fires are expected to be more frequent, international efforts to fight against CC do not consider forest fires’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions risk and the possibility of its mitigation. This is partly due to a lack of a methodology for GHG risk spatial assessment and consideration of the high value of carbon stocks in forest ecosystems and their intrinsic risk. To revert this, an innovative GHG emission risk model has been developed and implemented in a pilot forest area. This model considers geospatial variables to build up emission vulnerability based on potential fire severity and resistance of a landscape, value at risk and the hazard of a fire occurrence. The results classify low, moderate and high emission risks in the analysed areas. This identification of hotspots allows the prioritisation of fire prevention measures in a region to maximise the reduction of GHG emissions in the case of a fire event. This constitutes the first step in a holistic and consistent CC mitigation that not only considers anthropic GHG sources but also possible GHG emissions by forest fires that can be actively prevented, managed and reduced.

Estimating the Trade-Offs between Wildfires and Carbon Stocks across Landscape Types to Inform Nature-Based Solutions in Mediterranean Regions

“…Our carbon stock results, including aboveand below-ground biomass and litter, confirmed their robustness as a proxy for climate research, where soil carbon information is not available or accurate enough. Although the innovative approach of joining forest and agriculture biomass carbon does not allow direct comparisons, our findings confirmed their dual relevance in sourcing soil organic carbon, in line with desertification and aridification studies [57,58,63,64], and also in feeding GHG emissions [61].…”

“…Our results suggest that robust models representing a landscape's fire protection and carbon storage performance can be built with basic fire and carbon information, which are usually available in Mediterranean-climate regions. This approach allowed the decoupling of the two studied ecosystem services to optimize models for each component, and then integrate them to explore trade-offs in respect to different LULC classes to address climate change mitigation in the land system and inform nature-based solutions [61].…”

Estimating the Trade-Offs between Wildfires and Carbon Stocks across Landscape Types to Inform Nature-Based Solutions in Mediterranean Regions

“…Our CS results, including above-and below-ground biomass and litter, confirmed their robustness as a proxy for climate research, where soil carbon information is not accurate enough. Despite the innovative approach of joining forest and agriculture biomass carbon does not allow direct comparisons, our findings confirmed their dual relevance in sourcing soil organic carbon, in line with desertification and aridification studies [56,57,60,61], and also feeding GHG emissions [59].…”

“…This approach allowed the decoupling of the two studied ecosystem services to optimize models for each component, and then integrate them to explore trade-offs in respect to different LULC classes. Understanding trade-offs between the most hazardous FR and CS is a priority step to address climate change mitigation in the land system as a whole [59].…”