Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally

Abatzoglou, John T., Kolden, Crystal A., Cullen, Alison C., Sadegh, Mojtaba, Williams, Emily L., Turco, Marco and Jones, Matthew W. (2025) Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally. Nature Communications, 16. ISSN 2041-1723

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Abstract

Regions across the globe have experienced devastating fire years in the past decade with far-reaching impacts. Here, we examine the role of antecedent and concurrent climate variability in enabling extreme regional fire years across global forests. These extreme years commonly coincided with extreme (1-in-15-year) fire weather indices (FWI) and featured a four and five-fold increase in the number of large fires and fire carbon emissions, respectively, compared with non-extreme years. Years with such extreme FWI metrics are 88-152% more likely across global forested lands under a contemporary (2011–2040) climate compared to a quasi-preindustrial (1851–1900) climate, with the most pronounced increased risk in temperate and Amazonian forests. Our results show that human-caused climate change is raising the odds of extreme climate-driven fire years across forested regions of the globe, necessitating proactive measures to mitigate risks and adapt to extreme fire years.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability: Historical meteorological data used herein from ERA-5 are available from (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/), and climate projections used in the paper are available at https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/583391. Gridded burned area data is available from the MODIS global burned area product MCD64A1 (https://modis-fire.umd.edu/ba.html). The Global Fire Atlas and GFED4s fire carbon emissions are available at https://zenodo.org/records/11400062 and https://www.geo.vu.nl/~gwerf/GFED/GFED4/, respectively. Code availability: No specialized code for data analysis was developed for this study. Funding information: The work was supported through grants from the NSF Growing Convergence Research Program (OAI-2019762) to J.T.A. and A.C.C., Department of Interior’s Joint Fire Science Program (21-2-01-1 and 21-2-01-3) to J.T.A., M.S., and E.W. and UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/ V01417X/1 to M.W.J.
Faculty \ School:	University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climatic Research Unit University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
Related URLs:	https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-0...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	03 Sep 2025 09:57
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2025 00:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100280
DOI:	10.1038/s41467-025-61608-1

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