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© FT • Cartography: Steven Bernard
Map animation showing the fire radiative power of fires across the northern hemisphere since April
Climate scientists have warned that extreme wildfires are becoming more destructive in zones where they traditionally occur, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and France, and will rise in areas such as Germany and Poland.
Scientists said fires were becoming more intense and harder to control, after northern hemisphere blazes that included a forest fire in Greece that was the largest ever recorded in the EU, devastation on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and vast fires across Canada and north Africa.
In future, areas such as the Arctic and rainforests not previously affected could witness fires that were difficult to suppress, they said at a media briefing this week.
“We’re seeing wildfires burning longer and hotter in places that they have always happened in, and flaring up in unexpected places that we wouldn’t expect to burn, like the Arctic, peatlands and rainforests” said Chantelle Burton, senior climate scientist at the UK Met Office. “Those areas aren’t well adapted to fire, which means they’re having larger impacts.”
Global warming had exacerbated the conditions for wildfires, she added, as night-time heatwaves occurred and were more conducive to blazes springing up.
Predicting and responding to wildfires has become an increasingly international effort.
Global wildfires emissions in 2023 so far this year are already the third-worst on record, according to the European earth observation agency Copernicus. The Canadian wildfire emissions alone account for 27 per cent of the global total.
The UN Environment Programme forecasts that by 2100 extreme wildfires could increase globally by up to 50 per cent.
Wildfires typically occur in places with ample vegetation, such as forests, grasslands and savannahs, where the resulting biomass in increasingly dry conditions provides excess fuel for fires.
If the area has experienced high temperatures and a lack of rainfall, the vegetation’s dryness coupled with an ignition such as lightning or sparks from power lines can start a fire.
Wind speed and humidity can also accelerate its progress, and changes in vegetation levels across the world combined with increasingly dry conditions are leading to longer fire seasons, scientists said at the briefing on Wednesday.
The record for emissions caused by wildfire occurred in 2003, when nearly 2,500mn tonnes of carbon were released into the atmosphere. Like 2023, that year saw record temperatures in places such as the UK and Portugal, and 70,000 heat exposure-related deaths in Europe.
Although researchers note that climate change-driven high temperatures alone do not cause wildfires, global warming can exacerbate the conditions for them to start.
“The important thing to note here is that climate change can affect fuel, dryness and weather,” said Douglas Kelley, land surface modeller at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. “So it has a lot of influence over key parts of how fires occur and how they’re being spread.”
But the scientists stressed that mitigating climate change would not be enough to eliminate wildfires. The Met Office’s Burton said land managers must prepare in advance for high fire seasons and the public should be warned to avoid activities such as barbecuing on natural lands during heatwaves.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions does mean that it will help alleviate some of these increases, but it doesn’t mean that fires are going to disappear completely,” she said. “So we do need to learn to adapt to fires.”
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