Climate change increases the risk of extreme wildfires around Cape Town – but it can be addressed

Across the globe, many recent severe wildfires have moved from wildlands into the urban periphery (the “wildland urban interface”). In their wake, they’ve left death, destruction and disruption. This has led to questions about the extent to which climate change is to blame.

A field of study called extreme event attribution has developed to answer such questions. These studies quantify the links between global climate change, regional extreme weather events, and their effects on people, property and environment.

This branch of attribution science aims to inform climate change adaptation following extreme events. It also highlights that long-term, global-scale climate change is having real impacts, now, at the scale of human experience. Attribution studies can make the public more acutely aware of climate change effects and increase support for mitigation measures.

But the rapidly growing body of event attribution analyses shows a strong bias towards extreme events in the global north. Few attribution studies have considered African events.

One of us, Zhongwei, recently led and Stefaan was involved in the first attribution study to quantify the role of climate change in the risk of extreme fire weather conditions in southern Africa.

Wildfires are complex phenomena. They can only be understood fully by considering social, environmental and weather conditions together. We know, however, that extreme wildfire events occur almost exclusively under extreme fire weather conditions. Studying associations between global warming and fire weather can provide evidence for how wildfire potential is changing and help to inform responses.

We analysed the destructive April 2021 wildfire on the slopes of Devil’s Peak in Cape Town, South Africa under extreme fire weather conditions. We concluded that such extreme fire weather has become around 90% more likely in a warmer world.