Spring fire potential across Australia awaits the full impact of El Nino

Seasonal Bushfire Outlook for Spring (Sept-Nov) 2026

Australia is facing a watch and wait scenario for its summer bushfire season as the latest Bushfire Seasonal Outlook predicts a mild but warm spring before the main El Nino impacts are expected to appear later in the year.

El Nino is now firmly established and the Bureau of Meteorology is watching it continue to strengthen with a peak not expected until late Spring or early Summer. Meanwhile, Australian fire agencies are watching the severe northern hemisphere wildfire season and thinking about what it means for the southern hemisphere summer and the provision of mitigation and firefighting resources, both people and aircraft, some of which are currently in the US, Canada and Europe.

The Australian Seasonal Bushfire Outlook for Spring was released today at the AFAC26 by Intershutz conference in Melbourne. The Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC), the Bureau of Meteorology and the nation’s Fire Commissioners and Chiefs prepare the quarterly outlook to prepare resources and community messages tailored for each state.

The Spring outlook is important for the populous eastern and southern states as it leads into the main summer bushfire season. The next outlook, to be released late November, will have a clearer picture of what Australia will face this El Nino summer.

The Bureau is predicting below average rainfall and higher than average temperatures across most of eastern and southern Australia up to November. This will dry out many of the areas that have received good rainfall this year.

While the El Nino is important, it is not the only climate driver being watched. The Bureau’s Michael Logan, General Manager of National Production Service, said El Nino was one part of the picture.

“An El Nino event is underway, it is strengthening and it is going to be a very strong one. But that is not the only driver that influences the Australian climate.,” Logan said at the outlook launch.

“The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is currently neutral but models are suggesting a positive IOD is underway, which also influences Australian rainfall. We also have very warm sea surface temperatures around much of our coastline. All of these will come into play as we go through Spring in terms of fire risk, and also potentially into summer as well.”

Michael Logan, Bureau of Meteorology, at the Australian Seasonal Bushfire Outlook launch, Spring 2026

Fire authorities are predicting a heightened risk of fire across northern and southeastern New South Wales, south-east Queensland, northeastern Tasmania, parts of Western Australia (WA), South Australia and Victoria, and most visibly, large parts of the Northern Territory.

The current fire season in the Top End is expected to extend an extra month, into November, with a late wet season keeping the fire risk high. Central areas of the Northern Territory also face an elevated fire potential due to high fuel loads.

The strong 2025-2026 wet season produced a flourishing mass of greenery and an associated influx of animal and bird life that is now drawing in the tourists. But this will evolve into a dry mass of fuels as the NT moves into a hotter, drier period over the next few months.

Australian Seasonal Bushfire Outlook launch, Spring 2026

Fire and Climate – a special and timely collection

The 2026 wildfire season shows us that with increased wildland fire risk, more intense fire behaviour, longer seasons, and fire evolving across many landscapes, a changing climate poses significant challenges to today’s fire regimes and management strategies.

The International Journal of Wildland Fire has published a Special Collection to showcase papers from and inspired by the Fire and Climate conferences hosted by the International Association of Wildland Fire in 2022 in Pasadena, United States and Melbourne, Australia.

The collection explores the way that climate change is affecting wildfire around the world – and the ways that changes in societal, legal, and political climate changes interact with these geophysical processes.

The following is the editors’ foreword to the Collection plus links to the individual papers.

Guest IJWF Editors
Eric B. Kennedy (York University, Canada)

Nuria Prat-Guitart, Pau Costa Foundation, Spain

Richard Thornton, Australia

For readers of the International Journal of Wildland Fire (IJWF), the connections between climate change and wildland fire need almost no introduction. The effects of climate change have been a repeated topic of investigation over the 35-year history of the journal, with researchers and practitioners from around the globe grappling with its impacts on fire regimes, management practices and wildfire’s effects on society. Indeed, in the very first issue of the journal, Simard wrote of the need to attend to global climate change in thinking about fire severity across timescales (1991). Since then, over 300 articles have been published through IJWF that include climate in their title or abstract.

Throughout this time, the journal has played host to all sorts of investigations of fire and climate change, offering a more nuanced and complex understanding of fires past, present and future. Many studies, for example, have explored the many ways that climate change may affect fire regimes in particular regions, such as de Santana et al. (2022) in the Amazon, King et al. (2011) in Australia, Wotton et al. (2010) in Canada and Pimont et al. (2022) in France, to name only a few of dozens of such important inquiries. Similar investigations have also spanned scales from the global (e.g. Flannigan et al. 2009) to extremely local study sites (e.g. Honig and Fulé 2012). Climate change’s impacts have also been shown to be profoundly human: climate change effects on wildfires, for instance, present potentially increasing health impacts, like the growing public health risk as result of increasing wildfire smoke exposure (e.g. Reisen et al. 2015). Climate change also stresses contemporary management practices, requiring reflection on approaches to land and fire management (e.g. Diggins et al. 2010; Aponte et al. 2016), such as increasing challenges in finding suitable prescribed fire opportunities (Kupfer et al. 2020).

The IJWF has also been home to critical perspectives on the complexities and nuance of climate change, its impacts and its uncertainties. In 1999, for instance, McAlpine argued that climate change was not yet detectable in fire management expenditure trends. In 2010, Bergeron et al. suggested that while climate change would increase burn rates, the increase from climate changes alone might be relatively modest in comparison with the natural range of variability. And, in contrast, Peace and McCaw (2024) have argued that existing science underestimates the potential impact of climate change on fire behavior and difficulties in conducting fire suppression operations.

Despite this rich foundation of empirical and theoretical work, however, it is clear that significant questions remain unanswered (Little et al. 2025). While it is often tempting to think of climate change in terms of planetary averages, its impacts are unlikely to be homogeneous across the globe. As such, some of today and tomorrow’s research questions are found in localization: how might climate change affect particular fire regimes, ecosystems or human/fire relationships in different regions across the planet? Other questions emerge as we adopt a broader understanding of climate change, such as its impact on watersheds or catchments and water supplies (e.g. Rhoades et al. 2019), the impact of widespread smoke exposure (Henderson et al. 2024), the social and human dimensions of fire (e.g. McCaffrey et al. 2012; Christianson 2014), or even the ways that fire-mediated climate impacts can relate to mental health, climate grief, sociopolitical instability and varied forms of suffering (Newman Thacker et al. 2025). Reflection will be required on the role of fire science and how to reform the enterprise to overcome challenges with siloed work or research isolated from practice (see Copes-Gerbitz et al. 2024). More questions will still emerge as we identify potentially paradoxical or counterintuitive impacts of climate change, such as ways that short term fire reductions or sharper oscillations into wet cycles might have medium and long-term risks for fire.

Multiplicative impacts and climate(s) changing

More challenging, though, than these individual research questions alone is dealing with two layers of complexity.

The first is the multiplicative impact of climate change when situated amidst many other factors that influence fire regimes. A changing geophysical climate does not exist in isolation but is interconnected with the impacts of historic and current approaches to suppression; changes to fuel and vegetation management; the marginalization of indigenous and local fire knowledges and practices; changes in where and how we build and live in interface and intermix areas; and so on. These diverse stressors are not simply additive when it comes the impact of climate change, but often multiplicative. Atmospheric changes interacting with these physical, ecological and sociological dimensions often creates a challenge that is much bigger than the sum of their parts, and where the localized outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between these many factors.

These multiplicative effects in the causal pathways also interact, causing cascading and compounding fire impacts. Changes in our fire regimes are the result of these many stressors multiplying together, but they can be further exacerbated when ‘compounding’ events – two or more events occurring simultaneously, such as heatwaves, droughts and wildfires – further amplify the impacts of the fire on life safety, public health, ecological damage and community resilience. Also, the cascading nature of fire events – such as subsequent events triggered by the fire like impacts on drinking water quality and quantity or soil stability and erosion – provides yet more of complexity. Effectively managing fire and climate requires tackling its multiplicative nature, as well as its compounding and cascading impacts.

The second, and even broader challenge, comes from the changes in climates, plural. While we typically use the term ‘climate change’ to refer to atmospheric and geophysical changes alone, it is readily apparent that many different climates are changing concurrently. Writing this introduction in mid-2025, it is hard to overstate how much the political and governance climate for wildland fire has changed. For many US-based colleagues in fire, these shifts are existential: how fire management will be arranged at an institutional level; whether fire, weather and climate research will continue to exist in any meaningful capacity; and what transnational and international fire collaboration and fire diplomacy will look like now and into the future. Despite its deeply ecological and meteorological subject matter, fire management is fundamentally a social and political enterprise, and the governance climate is at least as influential over fire regimes as the atmospheric climate.

Social climates are just as central to fire regimes. As extreme fire events continue to occur, and indeed increase, and as charismatic, impactful and tragic fires continue to garner public attention, the way we imagine fire – and our ideal relationship with it – may either change or become more deeply engrained. In turn, these beliefs, attitudes and assumptions can shape what solutions are seen as possible (or even considered at all). Shifting demographic, cultural and geospatial drivers over how we arrange our societies will have profound impact on what the wildland–urban interface and intermix areas look like, as well as changing the ‘social contract’ vital for fire management. To what degree, for example, will public expectations for metropolitan levels of fire protection grow as urbanites migrate to rural areas, and how will wildland fire’s progression into urban conflagrations challenge these metropolitan norms? How much money are we willing to allocate to fire, and how will it be apportioned between mitigation, response and recovery? And, how will existing institutions like insurance and utilities navigate what may become existential-level challenges? We can even think of broader social climates – like societal views about the degree to which we ought to care for our neighbors, strangers and our planet – which ripple into our choices about fire in particular.

And, underpinning all of this, our philosophy of fire will continue to ebb and flow. Such paradigmatic changes have occurred historically, from broad use of fire, to mentalities of total suppression, and back towards at least partially acknowledging that fire is vital and necessary. How will we define fire on a fundamental level: enemy or friend; problem or symptom; exceptional emergency or ongoing relationship? What do we owe to one another in society when it comes to fire and our approaches to managing it? Whose knowledge counts and who is included when it comes to fire management? These ontological, ethical and epistemological questions – and the philosophical culture of fire that arises from how we answer them – will continue to represent another profound form of change.

At the same time, there is also potential to induce beneficial shifts in sociopolitical climates that shape wildfire and our relationship with it. Shifts towards global collaborations – such as the 2025 launch of the Global Fire Management Hub of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or increasingly diversified mutual aid agreements on a global scale – indicate that polarization, isolationism and competition are not the only possible approaches to managing fire. A redoubled commitment towards equity, diversity and inclusion is also seen in some global organizations, reminding us that fire management must serve all – and is stronger when we can leverage everyone’s experience, wisdom and expertise.

Geophysical climate change, for all its irresolvable complexity, in some ways represents a comparatively simple component of these interwoven challenges. What the fire management enterprise faces over the months, years and decades ahead is the coupled challenge of atmospheric climate change multiplied by many other stressors, and the fact that atmospheric climate change is only one of several changing climates shaping fire management today.

Introducing the articles in the special issue

It is in this context of complexity that the special issue was launched. Born out of a series of ‘Fire and Climate’ conferences run by the International Association of Wildland Fire in Pasadena, California, US and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, this special issue brings together projects emerging from those discussions and deliberations. While the articles ultimately included in this issue tend towards a more traditional geophysical understanding of climate, they also allude to and open up questions of this multiplicative nature of fire, as well as how changing climates (plural) will affect fire regimes and fire management and ultimately how people live with fire.

Some of the articles that follow fit seamlessly into the rich tradition of work in IJWF on fire and climate change described at the opening of this introduction. Lambrechts et al. (2024), for example, explore what a changing climate could mean for fire danger days in the Netherlands. By looking at the impact of climate change on fine fuel moisture codes and fire weather index values, Lambrechts et al. assessed the prospective changes under ‘limited’ and ‘rapid’ climate change scenarios. While the limited change scenario has no substantial increase in fire danger days, the rapid scenario could see almost a doubling of fire danger days by the end of the century. These risks are also not spread evenly across the country, with the biggest risk increase occurring in the southern and central regions of the country.

Similarly, Plucinski et al. (2023) examine the ways that climate changes manifest in impacts on fire behavior. They explore the role of drought in fire and particularly the relationship between two Australian drought measures, the Keetch–Byram Drought Index and McArthur’s Drought Factor, and different ways of assessing fire occurrence. Two of the most relevant conclusions for understanding climate change are (1) that ‘it need only take a drying event of a few weeks during a fire season to lead to a spike in fire ignitions’ (p. 7) and (2) that it’s critical to understand regional variation in interpreting the values provided by both metrics (e.g. differences in solar energy, evaporation, topography and vegetation coverage).

Other articles in the issue examine how climate change fits into dimensions of wildland fire. Taylor et al. (2023), for example, look at the association between Australian fire behavior and major climate drivers like El Nino, the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the Southern Annular Mode. In documenting these connections, Taylor et al. urge readers to understand the importance of knowing when these signals are most useful (e.g. a positive IOD in winter should be a potential warning to southern and central Australian bushfire authorities, while a positive IOD in spring only offers ‘minor increases in probability ratios for eastern Australia,’ p. 21). If models better accounted for these phenomena, and if managers understand the nuances of how to read these signals, there is potential to make operational improvements in scheduling prescribed fire, firefighter recruitment and other preparedness activities.

Underwood et al. (2024) explores another prospective impact of climate change: the way that fire can affect ‘ecosystem services’ performed by different species, such as the adverse impact of affected native shrubland loss on carbon storage, water runoff and erosion. Underwood et al. developed an online tool that combines pre-fire ecosystem services data and burn severity data to produce estimates for resource managers of how ecosystem services are affected by a particular fire. Such a tool has the potential to assist managers in targeting post-fire recovery and restoration activities.

Contributors to the special issue also grapple with questions around how climate change may be connected to prescribed burning. McCormack et al. (2023) unpack the critically important governance dimensions of prescribed burning. It’s easy for those of us in fire to articulate that we should ‘get more good fire on the landscape,’ but the devil is in the details: what laws, procedures, frameworks, policies, epistemologies, norms and identities enable or constrain that burning. McCormack et al. dive into these nuances, contrasting the enabling and constraining laws – and the changes in these laws over time – that affect prescribed burning in New South Wales, Australia and California. They insightfully draw out the ways that legal reform is inherently difficult, both in managing tensions between seemingly incommensurate goals (e.g. red tape reduction versus meaningful engagement and value negotiation), as well as in the importance for both iterative improvement and stability. This comparative study offers practical utility for lawmakers worldwide and also calls out for similarly detailed work on enablers and constraints on transformative approaches to fire management worldwide.

Partridge et al. (2024) pull the curtain back on some of the complexities involved in restoring prescribed fire to Australian landscapes. Drawing on a series of case studies, they identify that intensity matters: higher intensity fires risk increasing fuel density through promoting excessive shrubs and saplings. While these conditions can occur in wildfires, they are also possible when prescribed burns are conducted during dryer conditions – which can have the impact of reducing plant density. It can become part of a negative feedback loop, where native grasses smothered out by these burns are exactly the grasses required to sustain lower-intensity burns in the future, leading to a ‘hot fire trap’ for managers. The goal – at least from the standpoint of minimizing woody thickening – is low-intensity, patchy burning, which will likely require a variety of management techniques and a willingness to see the prospective risks with prescribed fire under more intense conditions.

Finally, two of the articles in the special issue also engage with questions of how we represent fire – and changing fire under climate change – in computational terms. Campbell-Lochrie et al. (2023) tackle a foundational question in fire science: how do we model the spread of fire and flame? In a sector where models are stacked and interlocked, with end-user tools relying on underlying assumptions and basic science, it’s critical to question whether tools like the Rothermel model have the potential to overpredict, underpredict or misrepresent likely fire behavior. Campbell-Lochrie et al. take this on by exploring fuel structures – such as the packing and density underlying fuel loading – in laboratory-based experiments. They find an almost 30% mean deviation between predicted and observed spread, suggesting considerations for those relying on this model in both application and experimental setups.

Radford et al. (2024) confront a perennial challenge in fire modeling: the typical need to trade off model accuracy for computational costs like runtime. In their paper, they propose an asset-centric approach to modeling that can account for multiple different spatial scales. Such asset-centric modeling has often been hampered by its comparatively more limited use of landscape and weather data, which can result in the inability to predict directionally specific patterns in fire spread such as fire shadows. Radford et al.’s new model offers a different balance which, based on testing in South Australia, seems to enable computational efficiencies while still affording more accurate fire pattern prediction.

Complexity and changing climates

The multiplicative forces and the cascading and compounding dimensions of wildland fire, together with the many different changes in climates we face all create significant pressures for managing wildland fire. They illustrate the ways that fire is both causal and symptomatic of larger societal conditions. They also highlight the ways that solving the fire problem- if that is even definable- requires attending to many large challenges we face in society more generally, whether that be atmospheric climate change, or the many other sociopolitical climate changes that fire managers must grapple with. Fire science will play a crucial role in highlighting and tackling these complex issues, but we will also have to think about the broader context within which this science occurs; issues of public trust, of protecting institutions and expertise, and of learning to live with all sorts of sparks, flash points and fires, literal and metaphorical.

Read the full Fire and Climate Special Collection in the International Journal of Wildland Fire – a publication of the International Association of Wildland Fire and CSIRO Publishing.

A guide to the basics on future fire and climate

View from the Warner Lookout Tower looking at the north section of the Emigrant Fire, September 2, 2025. Photo from Willamette National Forest, InciWeb.

Science is showing how climate change is increasing catastrophic wildfires around the world, but a new study claims we still lack the basic information to make more precise conclusions about fire and its future impacts.

Warming, on its own, may not increase the overall fire risk as heat is only one of the many influences on fire. And as impressive as the climate models may be, the real work is still to be done on using the model outputs to make real-life decisions that affect our daily lives.

We know a lot about fire. And we know a lot about climate. But there is so much more to the puzzle. A group of scientists from around the globe have collaborated on a paper that is a guide for piecing the puzzle together – from the published papers and the modelling, to creating tangible, useful projections on future wildfires.

The trend in the number of journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire.
The trend in the number of journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire. Graphic: Francesca Di Giuseppe

Lead author Assoc Professor Hamish Clarke, from the University of Melbourne, says that a more realistic alternative to reading absolutely everything published on the subject is to read this new paper in Science Advances: “Gazing into the flames: A guide to assessing the impacts of climate change on landscape fire.”

“It may seem obvious that climate change is making bushfires worse, but the truth is more complicated,” he explains.

Clarke led the global team of researchers to develop a guide to looking at climate change impacts on wildfires and they conclude that it is no longer going to be sufficient to just look at what wildfire researchers are saying.

“It’s clear it will take more than just experts from one field to accurately project what’s to come. Some of the disciplines we point to may be obvious – atmospheric physics, botany, ecology – but it’s also about other areas like health and medical sciences, economics and paleo science.

“More than this, it’s the knowledge that lies outside academia too, like emergency response agencies, land management agencies, Indigenous knowledge, and communities with lived experience of fire.”

The paper attempts to pull the fragmented pieces of knowledge together.

“The solution isn’t just collecting more and more. We need specialists who can join dots, summarise, synthesise, curate, find and make meaning in iterative dialogue with others. We can’t leave this task to AI, although computers can certainly help.”

It is difficult to keep up with all the published articles on wildfires and climate change.

Top 20 countries with the most journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire.
Top 20 countries with the most journal articles published on the topic of climate change and landscape fire. Graphic: Francesca Di Giuseppe

Readers can save themselves the effort of reading every paper on fire and climate change and check out this paper. “We try to guide the reader through some of the main currents in the scientific literature, with a focus on what we need to do to develop better assessments of climate change impacts on fire.”

Assoc Prof Clarke’s paper was co-authored by Francesca Di Giuseppe from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast UK, Lynn Johnston from Natural Resources Canada, Jennifer Marlon from Yale University, Trent Penman from FLARE Wildfire Research at University of Melbourne, Andy Pittman from ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and Climate Change at University of New South Wales, Guido R van der Werf from Wageningen University Netherlands, and Mike Flannigan from Natural Resource Science Thompson Rivers University Canada.

Russia declares multiple states of emergency as wildfires threaten thousands, government inaction continues

Multiple wildfires across Russia have caused officials to issue multiple states of emergency and evacuate thousands, while government officials are accused of largely ignoring the problem.

The latest state of emergency was issued by Novorossiysk Mayor Andrei Kravchenko on July 14, according to the Kyiv Independent. The city in southern Russia was forced to evacuate around 500 people from the fire that burned at least 153 acres as of July 15. More than 300 people, including workers from the Emergency Situations Ministry, were fighting the fire.

Two other regions declared wildfire-driven states of emergency at the beginning of July,  a Reuters article reported. The Republic of Sakha, also known as Yakutia, declared a federal state of emergency for wildfires on July 1. The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reported more than 107 registered wildfires burned more than 331,000 hectares (~818,000 acres) in the region.

The governor of the remote Siberian region of Tuva made the declaration on the same day as Sakha after a wildfire burned around 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) driven by intense heat, strong winds, and dry thunderstorms.

“At the moment, 23 forest fires have been registered on the territory of the republic,” said Vladislav Khovalyg, head of the Tuva region. “Most of them are in inaccessible mountainous areas. July as a whole promises to be the most difficult month in terms of the fire situation, and we have to fight for every hectare of forest.”

Experts warned that the nation was unprepared for an alarming wildfire season. The Moscow Times reported that limited state capacity for fire prevention and control, along with ongoing dry grass burning practices, worried experts of the potential for the season to turn into an annual crisis.

The “official indifference” was seen in real-time during the Siberia wildfires, which have burned an area the size of Normandy since the beginning of the year, French newspaper Le Monde reported. While the Russian government is preoccupied with its incursion into Ukraine, officials are neglecting necessary resources to fight wildfires burning throughout the nation.

“The problem is not just in the forest and its poor management,” an Irkutsk resident told Le Monde. “It’s largely in the heads of the people and the authorities, who don’t want to see it or fight it.”

The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reported more than 107 registered wildfires burned more than 331,000 hectares (~818,000 acres) in the region.

Russia’s wildfire problem is exacerbated by Earth’s changing climate. Recent research has shown wildfires will worsen in the coming years, even in areas where wildfires are currently rare, such as Russia’s alpine regions. Smoke from the worsening wildfires, e.g. in Siberia, is projected to cause thousands of deaths and billions in costs for East Asia.

RELATED: Climate change will make wildfires worse, even in areas that don’t have wildfires today

The colors on the Russian Hydrometeorological Center’s map below represent the number of days of predicted “high” and “extreme” fire danger in April, according to the Moscow Times. The purple indicates less than one day, the yellow between one and three days, pink between four and six days, red between seven and nine days, and dark red over ten days.

Russian fire map
Russian fire map

Soaring Himalayan wildfires don’t have only climate change to blame

Nepal has already seen 5,000 wildfires in 2024, the second-most wildfires recorded in a single year since record-keeping began in 2002. The fires have killed more than 100 people and have for days engulfed Kathmandu in hazardous wildfire smog.

“There is no respite from fires — both forest fires and house fires — continue to wreak havoc across the country in recent days,” the Kathmandu Post reported in April. “Massive fires have been raging across hectares of forest lands in more than a dozen places.”

The newfound prevalence of wildfires in the country has spiked researchers’ interest. A study published in the Climate Change scientific journal in 2023 analyzed the aftermath of 2021, Nepal’s worst wildfire year on record with 6,300 wildfires.

“In spring 2021, Nepal underwent a record wildfire season in which active fires were detected at a rate 10 times greater than the 2002–2020 average,” the study reported. “Prior to these major wildfire events, the country experienced a prolonged precipitation deficit and extreme drought during the post-monsoon period.”

Researchers concluded that both climate variability and climate change-induced severe drought played a factor in the country’s explosive wildfire growth. However, an environmental scientist stationed in Kathmandu recently told the Nature scientific journal that the study didn’t tell the full story.

Uttam Babu Shrestha, stationed at Kathmandu’s Global Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, told Nature a large cause of increasing wildfires is the deterioration of Nepal’s relationship with its forests. A 1979 World Bank report warned that the nation was nearing an “ecological disaster” as a result of the country’s widespread deforestation and heavy reliance on agriculture. Nepal’s government listened and decentralized the management of its forests, resulting in the country’s forest cover nearly doubling in three decades. The abolition of the country’s monarchy and transition to a federal system, however, left forest management by the wayside.

“But this new political atmosphere didn’t prioritize the management of community forests like before,” Shrestha said. “With no clear benefits coming out of forests, the locals don’t feel the same ownership.”

A proposal to lessen both wildfire severity and forest management inaction was proposed by the lead researcher of the 2023 study. Binod Pokhrel, a climate scientist at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, found that Nepal’s 282 weather stations could work together to inform community members.

“By using weather station data, we could precisely forecast drought index up to a local ward level,” Pokhrel told Nature. “The lack of management of increasing forest cover can easily lead to another disaster.”

Pokhrel proposed that a smartphone-based fire forecast would reduce the chance of fires getting out of control — and save lives. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development uses a similar idea to update its wildfire-monitoring webpage, but Pokhrel told Nature that the Nepalese government must be involved to safeguard against future disastrous wildfires.

Fires burn more tree cover every year due to climate change

A new report has confirmed what forest managers have been warning the public about for years: Forest fires are becoming more widespread thanks to climate change.

The report, created by researchers at the University of Maryland, broke down global satellite data and found wildfires were the cause of 26 to 29 percent of global forest loss between 2001 and 2019. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), further analyzes the researchers’ maps  to estimate just how many more acres of forests were lost to fires compared with two decades ago.

“We calculated that forest fires now result in 3 million more hectares (~7.4 million acres) of tree cover loss per year compared with 2001 … and accounted for more than one-quarter of all tree cover loss over the past 20 years,” OCHA said.

Worldwide forest loss

The researchers also reported that 70 percent of the tree cover lost to fires occurred in boreal forests, with fire-related tree loss increasing 3 percent every year since 2001. The cause of the increase was northern high-latitude areas warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet, contributing to longer fire seasons.

Worldwide forest lossTree cover loss from fires in tropical regions also increased by 5 percent per year since 2001, resulting in roughly 15 percent of global tree cover loss from fire over the 20-year period. The loss was reportedly worsened by increasing forest degradation attributed to deforestation and agriculture expansion.

“There is no solution for bringing fire activity back down to historical levels without drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and breaking the fire-climate feedback loop,” OCHA said in response to the report. “Improving forest resilience by ending deforestation and forest degradation is key to preventing future fires.”

The full report is [HERE].



Burning Hot: 50 Years of U.S. Fire Weather

Climate Central has examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of low humidity, high heat, and strong winds — across the U.S., using data from 476 weather stations to assess trends in 245 climate divisions spanning all 48 contiguous states over a 50-year period from 1973 to 2022.

Wildfire seasons have become longer and more intense, especially across the West, and the research also found that many parts of the East have experienced smaller but important increases in fire weather. Even small increases in the East — with almost 28 million homes in fire-prone areas — puts millions more people at increased risk. As the research intro points out, the same weather variables that influence fire weather and wildfire are factors that determine the safe use of prescribed fire, critical to reducing fuels and thus fire risk. More fire weather days means fewer windows for prescribed burning.

fire weather

The reports include both summaries and in-depth comparisons of Fifty Years of Fire Weather in the West (example: Some places, including parts of Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington, are experiencing fire weather more than twice as often now as in the early 1970s) and Fifty Years of Fire Weather in the East (example: New England has experienced a decrease in annual fire weather days, driven largely by fewer days in which the wind speed variable hit the analytical threshold). Reduced wind speeds could be partially attributed to a decrease in the temperature gradient between land and sea along the Gulf of Maine, as sea surface temperatures have warmed drastically due to climate change.

Climate Central’s new report, Wildfire Weather: Analyzing the 50-year shift across America, expands on wildfire risks and adaptation across the country. The full report discusses other key factors that influence wildfire, including fuels, other weather conditions, and human activity.

Earlier, warmer spring ramps up Eastern Area fire season

The Jimmy’s Waterhole Fire in New Jersey was declared 100% contained on Thursday by the New Jersey Department of Forestry, having burned some 3900 acres, nearly half the state’s annual average in two days.

This and other regional fires prompts a visit to the Eastern Area Fire Environment Outlook to explore the conditions that led to the late April fire bust. On Friday’s Morning Briefing, the Eastern Area Coordination Center had nearly 40 percent of reporting units in Very High to Extreme Fire Danger, with the largest fires in New Jersey, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Rhode Island. In the past week, the region recorded 349 fires for 12,600 acres.

While spring is often active in the east — as forest fuels dry out between winter snow and rains and prior to green up —  the last week was drier throughout the Northeast and Midwest, as well as in the Great Plains and Southwest. Look south and you can spot the focused and incredible “purple” deluge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and to the north there’s an unusual heart-shaped moisture pattern in Michigan.

7-Day Percent of Normal Precipitation through April 14, 2023.

Spring in much of the East and Midwest was also warmer than normal …

… resulting in a 10-20 day earlier start to spring in the South and East, per the National Phenology Network. At least one location in New Jersey was tracked at 27 days early.

Fire activity in the region has been moving northeast toward Maine with the bubble of heat, including a fire point seemingly in the Atlantic — though a closer look at the Fire Weather Dashboard (with fire points activated) places the the fire on Martha’s Vineyard.

Soon, though, the spring fire season will be taking a hiatus, with greenup, increasing humidity, and even fog on the way. By Monday, moisture is expected in the East, with most predictive service areas transitioning to “Little or no risk.”

County commissioner in Glenwood Springs wants “climate” removed from wildfire agreement

Garfield County in west-central Colorado signed off this week on the new multi-agency Roaring Fork Wildfire Collaborative, but not without a little creative editing. The Post Independent reported that county commissioners signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) joining 17 other local governments, fire districts, and state and federal agencies in the formation of the wildfire collaborative.

“The Roaring Fork Valley presents especially complex boundaries with the sheer number of agencies involved,” said Larry Sandoval with the BLM’s Colorado River Valley Field Office. He said the completion of this MOU is a major step toward effective collaboration in fire prevention and management.

The request for edits to the MOU originated with Garfield County Commissioner Tom Jankovsky. “A lot of the emphasis is coming from Pitkin and Eagle counties and the Forest Service to do more forest management,” he said, “which from my perspective is more than just prescribed burns.” Jankovsky wanted the MOU to include equal mention of logging, thinning, and other “more aggressive” forest management methods. “I find it ironic that this group talks about climate change, yet they look at forest management as burning the forest, which has the same effect as if we have a forest fire, just to a much smaller degree,” Jankovsky explained.

A third-generation native Coloradan, Jankovsky is serving his third term as Garfield County Commissioner. He is the public lands planning lead for the Board of County Commissioners and the former general manager of Sunlight Mountain Resort in Glenwood Springs. He asked that the word “climate” be removed from one sentence in the MOU where it stated that active management “… includes the use of the best available climate science that will help stakeholders understand how a changing climate will impact our landscapes and ecosystems, while also looking for opportunities to improve understanding through local research.” Jankovsky wanted the line to read “best available science” and not “best available climate science.”

Fire photo by Colorado State Forest Service
Fire photo by Colorado State Forest Service

Because fires have no boundaries and don’t recognize jurisdiction lines, the valley-wide collaborative is meant to have everyone on the same page. The 18 local, county, state, and federal agencies involved in wildfire management formalized their working relationship through the Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative; the Gunnison Times reported that talk of the collaborative started early 2022, when residents in the Roaring Fork River drainage discussed their interest in better fuels treatment. With several big fires in recent memory — the 2018 Lake Christine Fire, the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire, and the 2021 Sylvan Lake Fire — valley stakeholders began discussing solutions. The collaborative’s goals include improving communication and identifying critical areas of fuels reduction and vegetation treatment.

Signatories to the MOU are Aspen, Snowmass Village, Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, and Marble. County signatories are Pitkin, Eagle, Garfield, and Gunnison counties. Additional collaborators include Aspen Fire, Roaring Fork Fire and Rescue, Carbondale Fire, Glenwood Springs Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, and the BLM.

The 2002 Hayman Fire was the largest wildfire in Colorado state history for nearly 20 years, until the Pine Gulch Fire surpassed it in August 2020. The Cameron Peak Fire became the largest wildfire in Colorado history seven weeks later at 206,667 acres. With multiple record-breaking fires, the 2020 Colorado wildfire season became the largest in state history after burning 665,454 acres.

Large-scale wildfires are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. as climate change accelerates; since 2000 an annual average of 70,072 wildfires have burned an annual average of 7 million acres across the country. According to research by the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University, that’s more than double the annual average of 3.3 million acres burned in the 1990s, when a greater number of fires occurred annually. A 2016 study found that climate change had doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western U.S., and a 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather each season.

In Europe, balancing firefighting and war fighting

This article was first published at Wildfire Today

Erickson Air-Cranes in Greece
At least nine Erickson Air-Cranes photographed together for the first time. October, 2021 in Greece. Photo by Dimitris Klagos. (According to a report from Erickson, there may have been 10 Air-Cranes at the site.)

Climate change, increasing wildfires, and Russia’s war in Ukraine are combining to put unusual stresses on governments, especially in Europe. When wildfires become numerous or very large, threatening large numbers of residents, many countries will mobilize military units. They may use helicopters to drop water or transport firefighters or trucks to assist with logistics. The United States has eight Modular Airborne FireFighting Systems (MAFFS) that can be quickly loaded into military C-130s to drop retardant on fires. Soldiers on the ground can be transformed from warfighters to firefighters.

This year was the hottest summer on record in Europe. It followed what what is now the second hottest summer on the continent. During the worst drought in centuries wildfires burned about 50 percent more acres than the previous record set in 2017.

The Washington Post has an article about how the war is affecting countries in Europe, in this case Slovenia, that need to both fight wildfires as the climate changes and bolster the military as international tensions mount.

“There will be these disasters of fires or floods. It will be more and more common,” Defense Minister Marjan Šarec said in an interview. “We must spend our money for everything that is needed. Because safety has no price.”

“It’s not a dilemma of cannons or butter,” said Šarec, who has also been a volunteer firefighter. “As a serious country we must do both.”

But military leaders say the dual-headed challenge can sometimes be significant, and even contradictory.

“Our training is going on in a military way. Exercises. How to use military equipment, how to fight, how to protect. How to defend,” said Glavaš, the head of Slovenia’s military command. “When you stop this training and you go to civilian tasks you need to focus your mind from fighting to something else. It’s very hard sometimes.”

He said that fighting fires “definitely” had an impact on combat readiness.

Currently the European Union coordinates and funds the deployment of 12 fixed wing firefighting airplanes and one helicopter pooled by EU countries. Fire Aviation reported in July that the EU plans to purchase additional air tankers.

The European Commission issued a press release on  Oct. 5, 2022 confirming they are proposing to spend €170 million from the EU budget to reinforce its rescEU ground and aerial assets  in the summer of 2023. The rescEU transitional fleet would then have a total of 22 planes, 4 helicopters as well as more pre-positioned ground teams. Beginning in 2025, the fleet would be further reinforced through an accelerated procurement of airplanes and helicopters.

The Washington Post reported that Slovenian defense leaders decided this month to cancel a $343 million purchase of armored troop carriers as they contemplate buying more aircraft that could be used to fight fires.

Gérald Moussa Darmanin, France’s Minister of the Interior, said recently, “We want to increase the number of Canadair [water scooping air tankers] in our own fleet from twelve to sixteen. But the problem is not to buy them, it is to produce them. Today there are no longer any factories that do so.”

The CL-415 water scooping air tanker has been out of production for years, but De Havilland, which now owns the rights to the aircraft, announced on September 21 the planned construction of a huge aircraft manufacturing facility east of Calgary, Alberta. They expect to employ 1,500 workers to produce at least three lines of aircraft — DHC-515 (a modernized variant of the CL-415), DHC-6 Twin Otter, and Dash 8-400 (Q400).

An announcement from De Havilland said, “European customers have signed letters of intent to purchase the first 22 aircraft pending the positive outcome of government-to-government negotiations through the Government of Canada’s contracting agency, the Canadian Commercial Corporation. De Havilland Canada expects first deliveries of the DHC-515 [water scooping air tanker] by the middle of the decade, with deliveries of additional aircraft to begin at the end of the decade, providing other customers the opportunity to renew existing fleets or proceed with new acquisition opportunities at that time.”

In the near term it does not seem likely that European countries are going to be able to find and purchase dozens of purpose-built air tankers to meet their needs.

Before this year many of the firefighting aircraft typically used in Western Europe and the Middle East during the summer were contracted from Russia. With the war and sanctions that source has virtually dried up.

The Helicopter Investor reported that in April the Portuguese government expelled a team of Russian mechanics working on three of their Russian made Kamov helicopters, and shut down the hangar in Ponte de Sor where the maintenance crew was working. In 2006 the government spent €348 million to buy six Kamov Ka-32A helicopters which could transport personnel and drop water, but over the last 10 years have had difficulty keeping them airworthy. In January none of the six were operational.

The Portuguese Air Force has signed an agreement to purchase six Blackhawk helicopters outfitted for fighting wildfires. The aircraft will be supplied by Arista Aviation Services, a US-based firm which specializes in modernizing surplus US Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Delivery of the first two is scheduled for the first quarter of 2023.

For a number of years Erickson Inc. has contracted their firefighting Air-Crane helicopters to European governments. In 2021 Columbia Helicopters had Columbia Model 234 Chinook’s on contract in Turkey. Single engine air tankers regularly make the migration between South America and Europe as the fire season switches hemispheres.