Navigating the Era of Extreme Wildfires: Scientific Solutions and Future Directions

Each year brings new stories of extreme wildfires and megafires, highlighting the tragic loss of lives, destruction of homes and livelihoods, reduced air quality over vast regions, economic disruption, and cascading impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide. Science has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges, offering tools for better prediction, preparedness, mitigation, and management.

 

As I write this, wildfires in Los Angeles have captured public attention and dominated the news over the past week. Amidst the coverage, it is worth noting that scientific tools enabled warning of these events to be issued up to a week in advance. This is a clear example of the potential for science to reduce harm and save lives.

 

Once the flames settle, science also plays a key role in understanding the factors driving such events, including the contributions of climate change, land use, and management practices. These studies are crucial for highlighting the actions at both global and local scales that can help to mitigate wildfire risk to society and the environment. The quick turnaround of such studies increasingly allows scientists to provide timely insights to policymakers and other stakeholders while the events are still in the public memory.

 

This invited talk will introduce an exciting session on recent advances in understanding extreme wildfire characteristics, drivers, prediction, impacts, and mitigation strategies. I will summarise recent compelling evidence for changes in fire behaviour, including shifts towards the extreme end of historic fire regimes and differences between trends in forested and non-forested regions. I will also discuss attribution studies, which often—but not always—identify climate change as a key factor in extreme fire events. I will highlight breakthroughs in fire observation and modelling that show great potential to generate a step-change in our ability to predict extreme wildfires at the global scale.

 

Finally, I will discuss the ambitions of the State of Wildfires project to deliver annual reports that retrospectively dissect the extremes of the prior fire season globally, to keep the issue prominent in public and policy discussions, and to encourage action on climate and land use policies.