- 1Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment & Society, Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK (oliver.perkins@kcl.ac.uk)
- 2Department of Geography, King’s College London, London, UK
- 3Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK
- 4Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK
- 5Met Office, Exeter, UK
- 6Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change Laboratory, Technical University of Crete, Kounoupidiana, Greece
Whilst global burned area continues to decline, recent climate warming has led to an increase in the occurrence and intensity of extreme fires. Humanity must adapt to this new reality. Two proposed management options are a) prescribed livestock grazing, and b) prescribed fire use. Both methods promise cost-efficient means to reduce fire intensity, fire-induced vegetation mortality, and carbon emissions by reducing and fragmenting fuel loads. However, at present, there has been no systematic global assessment of the efficacy of these interventions. Reasons for this include a lack of data to understand their present-day distribution and impact as well as a lack of formal model structures to represent their uptake under future scenarios.
Here, we present two applications of the newly developed global, agent-based Wildfire Human Agency Model (WHAM!)1 to assess the potential effect of prescribed grazing and prescribed fire as adaptations to future fire regimes. Firstly, to explore the effect of prescribed livestock grazing on global fire regimes, we share a representation of livestock grazing intensity in WHAM! and its integration with the generalised linear models of Haas et al., (2). Secondly, we present work on a tight coupling of WHAM! with the JULES-INFERNO dynamic global vegetation model, focusing on parameterisation of how managed human fire use reduces fire-induced vegetation mortality.
Overall, early results suggest both management options already play a significant role in reducing global fire intensity and highlight the importance of considering dynamic human responses to a changing climate in global projections of future fire regimes.
1Perkins, O… et al. (2024). GMD.
2Haas, O. et al., (2022). Env. Res let.
How to cite: Perkins, O., Haas, O., Kasoar, M., Kelley, D., Teixeira, J. C. M., Voulgarakis, A., and Millington, J. D. A.: Adapting to fire in a warming climate: towards global assessment of prescribed grazing and prescribed fire, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-18640, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18640, 2025.
