Climate change could lead to increased wildfire activity in North America over the next 30 years: Berkeley study

Climate change is expected to disrupt future fire patterns, with some regions, such as the western United States, seeing more frequent blazes within the next 30 years, notes a study in the peer-reviewed journal Ecosphere.

Conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the June 12 study found increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet. “But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising,” Max Moritz, a fire specialist in U.C. Cooperative Extension and the study’s lead author, suggests in a statement.

The study received support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Science Foundation and The Nature Conservancy. It used 16 different climate change models to generate what researchers contend is one of the most comprehensive projections to date of how climate change might affect global fire patterns.

“Most of the previous wildfire projection studies focused on specific regions of the world or relied upon only a handful of climate models,” says study co-author Katharine Hayhoe, associate professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

The greatest disagreements among models occur for the next few decades. But the Berkeley study shows that for some areas, such as the western United States, there is a high level of agreement in climate models both near- and long-term.

“When many different models paint the same picture, that gives us confidence that the results of our study reflect a robust fire frequency projection for that region,” Hayhoe says.

Researchers project that, by century’s end, almost all of North America and most of Europe will see increased frequency of wildfires. Fire activity could decrease around equatorial regions over the same timeframe.

Higher wildfire frequency will be fuelled in large part by increasing temperature trends. More rainfall, though, could dampen fire activity in the equatorial regions, particularly among tropical rainforests.