Climate change is increasingly influencing fire behavior worldwide and intensifying fire smoke, endangering public health from air pollution caused by fires. These are the results of two new ISIMIP-based impact attribution studies, both published in Nature Climate Change.
The first study finds 15.8 percent higher global burned areas over the period 2003 to 2019 due to climate change, intensifying fire activity especially in Australia, South America, Western North America and Siberia. These increasing fire dynamics offset the decrease in burned area due to land-use changes and increasing population density. Building on this, the second study examines how climate change is linked to a global increase in deaths from fire-related air pollution. Climate change increased these deaths from 669 annually in the 1960s to over 12,500 in the 2010s.
The publications are part of our Cross-Nature Journal Special Issue on Impact attribution. Thanks so much to all co-authors and stay tuned for upcoming articles.
- Burton et al. (2024): Global burned area increasingly explained by climate change. Nature Climate Change. [DOI:10.1038/s41558-024-02140-w] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02140-w
- Park et al. (2024): Attributing human mortality from fire PM2.5 to climate change. Nature Climate Change. [DOI:10.1038/s41558-024-02149-1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02149-1
