Wildfire south of Porto, Portugal, September 2, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
The climate warming that we have been seeing is expected to continue along with the increased risk of larger, more suppression-resistant wildfires. Scientists have examined how this will affect fires in Europe up to a 1.5°C rise, which is the not-to-exceed target in the Paris climate agreement. Now a study is complete that examines increases of 1.5, 2, and 3°C warming scenarios. Not surprisingly, it found that the higher the warming level, the larger is the increase of burned area, ranging from ~40% to ~100% across the scenarios. Their results indicate that significant benefits would be obtained if warming were limited to well below 2 °C.
Ensemble mean burned area changes. Burned area changes (%) for a the +1.5 °C case with the stationary model SM (i.e., using Eq. 3), (b) the +1.5 °C case with non-stationary model NSM (i.e., NSM). using Eq. (4), (c) the +2 °C case with SM, (d) the +2 °C case with NSM, (e) the +3 °C case with SM, and f the +3 °C case with NSM. Dots indicate areas where at least 50% of the simulations (1000 bootstrap replications × the ensemble of RCMs) show a statistically significant change and more than 66% agree on the direction of the change. Coloured areas (without dots) indicate that changes are small compared to natural variations, and white regions (if any) indicate that no agreement between the simulations is found. Click to enlarge.
The paper, published in Nature, was written by Marco Turco, Juan José Rosa-Cánovas, Joaquín Bedia, Sonia Jerez, Juan Pedro Montávez, Maria Carmen Llasat, and Antonello Provenzale.
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