Wildfires on a changing planet

The distribution of wildfires on Earth will change as climate, land-use, and vegetation change. We use global empirical models of burnt area, fire size and fire intensity to explore future wildfire trajectories under ~1.5 and 3-4 °C warming with middle of the road future socio-economic conditions. Even under ~1.5 °C warming we find a change in wildfire patterns by the end of the 21^st century with reduced burning in tropical regions driven by changes in human activity but larger and more intense wildfires in extra-tropical regions driven by changes in climate and CO₂. With low climate change mitigation, burnt areas increase greatly across all vegetation types, overwhelming the current global decline. These findings suggest that even with ambitious climate change mitigation, current fire-suppression policies will fail in much of the world and mitigation scenarios that rely on expanding forest areas will be unrealistic unless they are designed with wildfire risks in mind.