As major natural hazards, wildfires pose a significant risk to many parts of the world. Theoccurrence of extensive fires in both hemispheres in recent years has raised importantquestions about the extent to which the changing nature of such incidents can be attributed tohuman-induced climate change. Offering reliable answers to these questions is essential forcommunicating risk and increasing resilience to major wildfires. While attribution of extremeevents to anthropogenic climate change has developed into an important subfield of climatescience, wildfires have received less attention compared to other heat-related extremes suchas heatwaves and drought. This is primarily due to the scarcity of the observational datasetsand the absence of a widely agreed-upon and effective methodological framework for wildfireattribution.Here, a globally applicable framework is developed to better understand and quantify howwildfire risk is responding to a changing climate. The framework is based on an empiricalstatistical methodology, facilitating its application to ’fire weather’ extremes from bothobservational records and the latest generation of global climate model ensembles. Particularattention is given to the sensitivity of the eventual findings to the spatial scale of the event,the chosen event definition and the climate model(s) used in the analysis.As part of a global analysis, a series of maps are constructed detailing the change inlikelihood of fire weather extremes, defined by both intensity and duration, throughoutthe world’s fire-prone regions as a result of rising global temperatures. Both observationand model-based analyses reveal an increase in likelihood of at least twofold across manyparts of the world, with considerable regional and inter-model variation. The value of theframework is demonstrated by combining results from a series of case studies of recenthigh-impact wildfires that differ by scale, duration and location. The conclusions drawn fromthis work provide a platform to guide future attribution analysis of fire weather events, andfacilitate reliable recommendations for responding to the hazards associated with wildfiresand enhancing resilience in the face of climate change.
Development of a global empirical-statistical framework for the probabilistic assessment of wildfire risk under climate change
Liu, Z. (Author). Jan 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy