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Human exposure and sensitivity to globally extreme wildfire events

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-19, 01:24 authored by David BowmanDavid Bowman, Grant WilliamsonGrant Williamson, Abatzoglou, JT, Kolden, CA, Cochrane, MA, Smith, AMS
Extreme wildfires have substantial economic, social and environmental impacts, but there is uncertainty whether such events are inevitable features of the Earth’s fire ecology or a legacy of poor management and planning. We identify 478 extreme wildfire events defined as the daily clusters of fire radiative power from MODIS, within a global 10 × 10 km lattice, between 2002 and 2013, which exceeded the 99.997th percentile of over 23 million cases of the ΣFRP 100 km−2 in the MODIS record. These events are globally distributed across all flammable biomes, and are strongly associated with extreme fire weather conditions. Extreme wildfire events reported as being economically or socially disastrous (n = 144) were concentrated in suburban areas in flammable-forested biomes of the western United States and southeastern Australia, noting potential biases in reporting and the absence of globally comprehensive data of fire disasters. Climate change projections suggest an increase in days conducive to extreme wildfire events by 20 to 50% in these disaster-prone landscapes, with sharper increases in the subtropical Southern Hemisphere and European Mediterranean Basin.

History

Publication title

Nature Ecology & Evolution

Article number

0058

Number

0058

Pagination

1-6

ISSN

2397-334X

Department/School

School of Natural Sciences

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

Copyright 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Understanding climate change not elsewhere classified

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