Climate change could triple area hit by European wildfires: Study
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Under a high emission scenario, by 2100 nearly 192 per cent more land would be burned per year – almost triple the area affected now.
PHOTO: AFP
- Climate change could nearly triple the area affected by wildfires in Europe by 2100, especially with high greenhouse gas emissions causing hotter, drier, and windier conditions.
- Under a low emission scenario, burned land could increase by 39%, but high emissions may raise this to 192%, impacting regions with little wildfire history.
- Improved wildfire management could significantly reduce burned areas, but extreme fires may overwhelm firefighting capacities and limit the effectiveness of these efforts.
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PARIS - Climate change could nearly triple the area of land hit by wildfires every year in Europe, and even fuel blazes in regions with little experience of tackling them, a study said on Aug 20.
The warning comes after the continent has battled weeks of devastating wildfires fuelled by dry conditions and a historically hot summer, with Belgium, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain hit by major blazes.
Wildfires may become more unpredictable and could overwhelm even those experienced in preventing and fighting them, the study said.
“Climate change is driving up fire activity across Europe as hot, dry and windy conditions become more severe,” said lead author Maik Billing, researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“Our results indicate there could be widespread increases in burned area even under comparatively low (global) warming of around 1.8 deg C,” he added.
The study said that by the end of the century, in the case of low greenhouse gas emissions, around 39 per cent more land would be burned per year compared to today’s average.
The scientists obtained the result using one of the two fire models they tested.
The second suggested a possible decrease in burned areas at a low level of global warming, but the researchers cautioned that it was based on historical data that may not necessarily be repeated in the future.
“Under increasingly extreme fire-weather conditions, fire behaviour may become more unpredictable and fires may overwhelm even well-developed firefighting capacities,” Billing told AFP.
The results are unambiguous in the event of a more pronounced increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
“If we emit more, and global temperatures rise by roughly 3.6 deg C, we see fires become much more prevalent, especially around the Mediterranean and across much of Western and Central Europe, including areas that to date have not experienced many fires,” Billing said.
Under the high emission scenario, by 2100 nearly 192 per cent more land would be burned per year – almost triple the area affected now.
But the study’s authors said better fire management could “substantially moderate” the increases, reducing burned area by 72 per cent to 92 per cent compared to scenarios without the improvements.
But this offset potential would be limited in the event of strong global warming.
“If Europe increases investment in wildfire management – training fire crews, proper equipment, good coordination etc – our projections show that this can make a significant difference,” said study co-author Thomas Hickler.
“But if fires become really extreme, our ability to contain them might break down and we do not know yet where this point is,” added the scientist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany. AFP
