Only the most extreme climate models should be used to plan for future wildfire risk, study finds

Gospers Mountain Fire 2019 NSWRFS

The wildfire action plan signed by 50 nations at COP30 in Brazil this month may already be outdated, according to a newly released study.

Carbon project insurance company Artio used data from three major wildfire events from across the globe, specifically the 2020 Pantanal fires in Brazil, the Gospers Mountain fire during Australia’s Black Summer in 2019-2020, and the record-breaking 2020 wildfire season in the United States.

The firm found that the amount of area burned in each of the fires was only predicted by severe warming scenarios. More moderate climate warming scenarios missed around half of the land that ultimately burned during the incidents.

The finding underscores how projects working to lessen wildfire severity globally may already be outdated, according to Artio CEO and Co-Founder Bilal Hussain.

“The main risk is that projects are designed for a climate that no longer exists,” Hussain told Wildfire Today. “Using outdated assumptions can result in projects being sited in areas that are now far more fire-prone, threatening the permanence of stored carbon and the credibility of nature-based solutions as meaningful climate tools.”

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Hussain said that even the Wildfire agreement, recently signed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, relies on moderate climate outlooks than severe ones. The agreement recognizes that climate change is worsening fire risk and calls for stronger prevention and adaptation, but Hussain said it doesn’t reflect that our extreme reality is already the norm.

Officials should begin prioritizing regions with lower exposure to compound heat and drought, or those with naturally fire-adapted ecosystems that can recover without total biomass loss as a result of Artio’s study, according to Hussain. Adaptive fire management strategies should also be considered standard project design features, and risk models should be continuously updated to reflect ever-changing ground and climate conditions.

“Our study suggests that, for such frameworks to be effective, they must assume severe climate scenarios as the default and integrate the data driven tools and modelling now needed to plan for those conditions,” Hussain said.

Artio provides early-stage insurance for investments in carbon projects and is incorporated as a company in England and Wales.

Click here to see the study’s details.

Saving carbon hotspots from burning could prevent wildfires

Keeping wildland fires from spreading to human communities is the first and foremost priority of the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighters, according to the agency’s 2022 Wildfire Crisis Strategy Implementation Plan.

“Community exposure is a central factor in the strategy to confront the wildfire crisis,” the plan’s text reads. The plan goes on to identify what it called “high-risk firesheds” within National Forest Systems lands that it would focus on shifting land management towards increasing fuels and forest health treatments.

Recent research published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, however, found that the USFS hallmark decade-long plan misses the mark and doesn’t truly address what would stop more intense wildfires from igniting in the centuries to come: reducing carbon lost by wildland fire.

Conifer forests throughout the western U.S. play an integral role in sequestering and storing carbon in Earth’s atmosphere when these forests have a wildfire burning through them, carbon is not lost equally. Higher amounts of litter, duff and downed woody material consumed by fire, as well as post-fire decomposing trees, cause a greater risk of carbon loss. An increase in carbon output into Earth’s atmosphere will further increase the effects of climate change and, in turn, make wildfires more widespread and intense.

The study, a collaboration with the Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy, and University of Montana researchers, first evaluated where carbon was the most exposed and sensitive to wildfires. “Exposed” was defined as the largest concentrated areas of living and dead biomass’ burn probability, while “sensitive” compared areas for potential carbon loss and carbon recovery following wildland fire. They found that the most exposed carbon was not necessarily the most sensitive to wildfire.

“Relative to their total conifer forest area, states containing the greatest proportion of most exposed carbon … were California (63%), New Mexico (49%), and Arizona (44%),” researchers said. “In contrast, states with the greatest proportion of most sensitive carbon … were New Mexico (74%), Utah (67%), and Colorado (66%).”

Researchers then built upon the agency’s “high-risk firesheds” by combining high-risk areas for human communities and high-risk areas for wildfire-caused carbon loss.

Firesheds represented in gold to emphasize that improving reciprocal relationships between humans and forests can support multiple ecological, social, and cultural values concurrently.
Firesheds represented in gold to emphasize that improving reciprocal relationships between humans and forests can support multiple ecological, social, and cultural values concurrently.

“After overlaying our 308 opportunity hot spots on previously published maps of 140 high-risk all-lands firesheds for human communities, we observed that 64 firesheds overlapped,” the researchers said. “Here we represented those firesheds in gold to emphasize that improving reciprocal relationships between humans and forests can support multiple ecological, social, and cultural values concurrently.”

Read the full study [HERE].