<p>Regions across the globe have experienced devastating fire years in the past decade with far-reaching impacts. Here, we examine the role of antecedent and concurrent climate variability in enabling extreme regional fire years across global forests. These extreme years commonly coincided with extreme (1-in-15-year) fire weather indices (FWI) and featured a four and five-fold increase in the number of large fires and fire carbon emissions, respectively, compared with non-extreme years. Years with such extreme FWI metrics are 88-152% more likely across global forested lands under a contemporary (2011–2040) climate compared to a quasi-preindustrial (1851–1900) climate, with the most pronounced increased risk in temperate and Amazonian forests. Our results show that human-caused climate change is raising the odds of extreme climate-driven fire years across forested regions of the globe, necessitating proactive measures to mitigate risks and adapt to extreme fire years.</p>

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally

  • John T. Abatzoglou,
  • Crystal A. Kolden,
  • Alison C. Cullen,
  • Mojtaba Sadegh,
  • Emily L. Williams,
  • Marco Turco,
  • Matthew W. Jones

摘要

Regions across the globe have experienced devastating fire years in the past decade with far-reaching impacts. Here, we examine the role of antecedent and concurrent climate variability in enabling extreme regional fire years across global forests. These extreme years commonly coincided with extreme (1-in-15-year) fire weather indices (FWI) and featured a four and five-fold increase in the number of large fires and fire carbon emissions, respectively, compared with non-extreme years. Years with such extreme FWI metrics are 88-152% more likely across global forested lands under a contemporary (2011–2040) climate compared to a quasi-preindustrial (1851–1900) climate, with the most pronounced increased risk in temperate and Amazonian forests. Our results show that human-caused climate change is raising the odds of extreme climate-driven fire years across forested regions of the globe, necessitating proactive measures to mitigate risks and adapt to extreme fire years.