The Effect of Climate Change on Global Wildfire Activity

Recent long and intensive wildfire seasons in many regions have highlighted the urgency to understand the shift in worldwide fire regimes, raising the question if human induced climate change has played a role therein. However, attributing changes in fire to anthropogenic climate change is difficult, since possible signals are confounded by multiple drivers including fire weather, fuel availability and sources of ignition. Therefore, fire indices or individual input variables are often used as proxies. There have been some attempts to model drivers of recent trends in fire, though assessment of overall anthropogenic climate change is still lacking. Recent integration of fire models into ISIMIP now allow us to perform a fire impact attribution analysis using multiple coupled fire-vegetation models. Here, we combine both ISIMIP factual and counterfactual simulations with remote sensed observations to understand how burnt area has changed over the historical period due to a changing climate.