Young people disproportionately exposed to lifetime fire risk: a Portuguese case study

Climate change is driving increased fire weather across the world: hot, dry and windy conditions lead to higher risk of fire ignition and spread and make fire suppression more difficult. With further warming, fire weather is projected to increase in many parts of the world, meaning today’s children and young people will be exposed to an ever-greater number of high-risk fire weather days during their lifetime. In this study, we analyze historical fire weather index (FWI) conditions over Portugal from ERA5 reanalysis to assess the representativity of the index to explain historical monthly burned area records from European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), for the period 1980-2020. Turning to EURO-CORDEX high resolution projections for the future, we then analyze exceedances of FWI values representing high (FWI>30) and very high (FWI>45) fire risk. Combining this with spatially explicit demographic projections from the Wittgenstein Capital Data Explorer (WCDE), we then apply a lifetime exposure framework to estimate the number of high and very high fire risk days that people of different generations in Portugal are projected to be exposed to during their lifetimes and under different SSP-RCP warming scenarios. We find young people in Portugal will be disproportionately exposed to high fire weather risk days compared to older generations during their lifetimes, and that they have the most to gain from ambitious mitigation. Our research highlights the intergenerational inequity inherent in anthropogenic climate change and underlines the urgency of ambitious mitigation and adaptation action to safeguard the rights of present and future generations.