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Authors: Andrew Dowdy, Luke Purcell, Sarah Boulter, and Livia Carvalho Moura
Reviewers: Cristina Del Rocio Montiel-Molina, Juan Pablo Argañaraz, Matthew P. Thompson, and Sheldon Strydom
Recent years have seen devastating wildfires in many regions of the world, following heatwaves and droughts. Much news coverage focuses on Northern hemisphere wildfires destroying towns, such as during the extraordinary 2020 fire season in the western United States. The extensive 2021 evacuations from the Greek island of Euboea brought haunting images of what researchers suggest will become more frequent events in Mediterranean countries.
Catastrophic wildfires rage in the global South as well. In 2019/2020, Australia experienced the unprecedented Black Summer fires, with news stories and shocking images broadcast internationally. Despite being a country shaped by fire in many ways, the sheer scale and intensity of the Black Summer fires brought into focus how global warming is adding to wildfire risk. The fires burned over 24 million hectares, thousands of homes were destroyed and 33 people lost their lives. The 2019-2020 massive fires destroyed critical habitats for hundreds of species, including those already threatened with extinction.
In Latin America, the rapid and widespread deforestation of savannahs and tropical rainforests, compounded by droughts and the limitations of existing fire management policies, has led to disastrous wildfires in recent decades. In 2019, more than 6 million hectares burned in the Chiquitania, Cerrado and Amazon regions in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru, mostly within protected areas of native vegetation. During the dry season of 2020, another long and destructive wave of wildfires swept through the area. Across Africa, fires are visible in satellite imagery throughout the year, adding up to vast burned areas in observation and monitoring records.
Over continents and biomes, there are similarities among these extreme wildfire events in the form of underlying risk factors, hazards and consequences for society and the environment. Long-term effects on physical and mental health are not limited to those fighting wildfires, evacuated, or suffering great loss. Smoke and particulate matter from wildfires deliver significant consequences for human health in downwind settlements, sometimes thousands of kilometres from the source. Research suggests that the most vulnerable – women, children, elderly, disabled and the poor – suffer the worst ongoing damage from their wildfire exposure, echoing the acknowledged understanding of this same result as the common outcome from most disasters.
The observed trends towards more dangerous fire weather conditions for wildfires are likely to continue increasing, due to mounting concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and attendant escalation of extreme-wildfire risk factors. Beyond changing climate, the heightened intensity of some wildfires can be attributed to land-use change and fire management approaches that do not appreciate the close relationships, evolved over millennia, between vegetation and fire.
With compounding effects of a heating climate that extends fire seasons and can deliver more natural ignition events, of changes in land use that introduce more combustible fuel and ignition risks, and of more communities built at the wildland-urban interface, significant challenges lie ahead as we learn more about how to live with the fire component of the ecosystems we occupy.