The ONFIRE project - on the response of fires to climate variability and change

As societal exposure to large fires increases, there is a growing concern about possible shifts in the fire regimes due to climate change. Understanding the response of fires to climatic variations is essential to adapt fire management systems and to design future prevention strategies. However, many aspects on this topic remain to be revealed.

ONFIRE, a Spanish national research project supported by the State Investigation Agency and by Ministry of Ministry of Science and Innovation, aims to push the state-of-the-art knowledge of climate impacts on fires beyond its current limitations and applications. Moreover, this project is open to any contributions. Specifically, we encourage any researcher/fire agency to joint this initiative.

In this contribution we show some preliminary results related to the main objectives of the ONFIRE project:

• The creation of a first-of-its-kind unified, open-access and user-friendly database comprised of all available burned area records from national inventories.
• A better understanding of past trends in fire series and their attribution to the anthropogenic component of climate change.
• An assessment of the spatio-temporal synchronicity of fire danger.
• The design and implementation of a public operational prototype system to perform global seasonal predictions of climate-driven fire risk for decision-making applications.

Acknowledgments
We acknowledge funding through the project ONFIRE, grant PID2021-123193OB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033. A.G. thanks the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades of Spain for PhD contract FPU19/06536.