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.
