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Abatzoglou, John T., Kolden, Crystal A., Cullen, Alison C., Sadegh, Mojtaba, Williams, Emily L., Turco, Marco and Jones, Matthew W. 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3480-7980
(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. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/climate_action |
| Faculty \ School: | University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climatic Research Unit |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Sep 2025 09:57 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Jun 2026 11:42 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100280 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41467-025-61608-1 |
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