Impact of socio-economic factors in burnt area for future climate scenarios

Fire processes are a complex component of the Earth System processes and their full representation has proven to be difficult to represent Earth System Models (ESM). Because of this, these processes are often simplified in fire enabled ESMs, for instance ignitions are usually modelled to increase at low population densities up to a threshold, and reduce thereafter, as suppression effects become dominant with the increase of population density. However, socio-economic, and cultural factors can play a significant role in shaping the behaviour of fire ignitions. This study aims to address this by implementing a socio-economic factor in the fire ignition and suppression parametrisation in the INteractive Fire and Emission algoRithm for Natural envirOnments (INFERNO) based on the Human Development Index (HDI). The inclusion of this factor reduced a large long-standing positive bias found in regions of Temperate North America, Central America, Europe, and Southern Hemisphere South America. This change also leads to improvements in the model representation of fire weather and anthropogenic drivers in tropical regions, by reducing the influence of population density changes. Therefore, this framework can be used to improve understanding of the anthropogenic impacts of fire in future scenarios based on different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways.