Data requirements for assessing global socio-economic wildfire impacts and risks

Wildfires are an emerging peril in traditional natural hazard risk assessment. Increasingly extreme fire behavior, unprecedented mega-fires and rising economic damages are commonly attributed to a combination of climatic shifts, expansion in areas where human development meets natural landscapes (wildland-urban interface), and an accumulation of fuel. 

Remote sensing products provide the most comprehensive data source for the global assessment of wildfires and their impacts. However, scientists and practitioners in Disaster Risk Reduction are faced with several fire products from different satellite missions, whose differences, advantages and limitations can be difficult to assess and understand, especially for users outside the remote sensing domain. At best, this issue complicates the process of identifying the most appropriate dataset, making it a challenging and time-consuming endeavor; at worst, it can result in inaccurate results. 

We address these issues by offering a concise overview of remote sensing fire products and clarifying terms that are interpreted differently across scientific communities, with a focus on their application in risk assessment. Our analysis centers on products representing burned area and active fire locations. While burned area products leverage several satellite overpasses and reflect the area affected by large fires best, active fire location products provide the fire radiative power, a measure of the fire intensity, which is an important metric linked to impacts. 

We present a historic wildfire hazard set, which combines burned area data and fire radiative power recorded by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite product for the years 2002–2023. We join this hazard set with exposure datasets (representing physical assets and population) and damage records to calibrate socio-economic vulnerabilities to wildfires. This forms the basis for estimating wildfire impacts and risks, necessary for prioritising adaptation options and the pricing of insurance.