Topic
Uncontrolled vegetation fires, including their behaviour, their management and how their regimes respond to climate and fuels.
Global fire incidents fell 12.3% in the first half of 2020 as lockdowns kept people home, a study in Cell Reports Sustainability finds. Its authors take the countries that burned more as evidence that people put fires out as well as start them.
Reality
Simon Fraser University researchers put the climate-driven cost of Canadian wildfires at more than $2.1 trillion this century under 3 to 4 degrees of warming. Holding warming to 2 degrees would keep costs near those of recent decades, lead author Sian Kou-Giesbrecht said.
Reality
Michael-Shawn Fletcher's team found tree cover around a southeast Australian lake rose from about 10 to 40 per cent after colonisation ended Indigenous burning. That puts forest fuel among the fire risks people can manage, though one lake cannot prove that restored burning would reverse the change.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
University of Florida researchers report that cogongrass, now in almost every Florida county, makes fires spread faster with longer flames. The effect peaks in late winter and early spring, so controlling the grass now belongs in wildfire planning for burn crews and homeowners.
Reality
Scientists report charcoal from 90-million-year-old fires in a seafloor core drilled about 900 km from the South Pole, the southernmost wildfires on record. Fire grew more common as rainforest gave way to moss bog, but the case that fire drove the change rests on timing in one core.
Reality
Recently burned Alaskan forest reburns 1 to 3 orders of magnitude less often than older forest, Gaglioti and colleagues find in 1984-2020 fire data. Extreme fire weather weakens that barrier most in young stands, so a scar's value as a firebreak depends on its age and the weather.
Reality