Risk adaptation is generally defined as the process of adjustment to expected climate and societal changes, to be better prepared to mitigate the negative impacts of extreme wildfires and benefit from the positive ones.
Within FirEUrisk a number of aspects related to Risk Adaptation were explored. These consisted of Future Projections of Fire Dynamics at the European Scale, Future Fire Weather Trends and Future Changes in Land Use Management.
Future projections of Fire and Vegetation Dynamics on European scale
As part of FirEUrisk’s approach to risk adaptation a comprehensive dataset on simulated fire and vegetation dynamics across the European continent was developed. This dataset provides simulations of future fire regimes generated using two distinct modelling approaches: The LPJmLv5.6-SPITFIRE and LPJmLv5.6-SPITFIRE-BASE fire-enabled DGVMs. SPITFIRE is a process-based fire model developed at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). BASE, an empirical burned area model, has been developed by the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt and utilises remotely sensed data and generalized linear model (GLM) techniques, incorporating data from FirEUrisk and other sources. Billig et al (2023)
The two modelling approaches provide projections of future vegetation and fire dynamics under changing climate and land-use conditions across Europe at a 9 km resolution, covering the period 2000–2100. These simulations integrate fire-enabled DGVM outputs from five climate models under the SSP126 and SSP370 climate scenarios, along with corresponding land-use projections. The dataset includes fire and vegetation variables at monthly and annual temporal resolutions and contains detailed metadata with examples how spatial and temporal information that can be extracted.
This dataset represents a significant contribution to understanding future fire risks and ecosystem responses, providing a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders.
The final data can be accessed through https://doi.org/10.5880/pik.2023.005.
Fire Weather Trends in Europe
Over the past decade, Europe has experienced increasingly hotter, drier, and more fire-prone conditions, raising concerns about the impact of climate change on future fire weather patterns. A widely used metric for assessing fire weather severity is the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI).
As a part FirEUrisk’s approach to risk adaptation, high-resolution, bias-corrected climate model output (~9 km) from different climate models and Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) projections were analysed to assess fire weather trends across Europe from 1950 to 2080. The objective of this research is to identify regional and large-scale shifts in fire weather severity and its predictability over time to support adaptive planning.
Findings indicate that fire weather severity is projected to increase regardless of the SSP scenario. However, the increase is significantly more pronounced under scenarios with high greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, new regions, including Central Europe and rapidly warming mountainous areas, are expected to experience severe fire weather conditions. Meanwhile, already fire-prone regions in Southern Europe are likely to face even more extreme fire risks. The study concludes that only the low-emission SSP1-2.6 pathway can effectively limit the rise in fire weather severity beyond the 2050s.
For more information, see the associated publication (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad5b09)
Future Land management in a changing climate incl. the socio-economic climate
Changes to land use have consequences for fuels and fire risk. Land use changes (LUC), such as rural outmigration and land abandonment (Sil et al., 2019), expanding wildland urban interfaces (Bar-Massada et al., 2023), and afforestation (Pantera et al., 2018) affect fuel layout, composition, vegetation type, moisture content, density, and many other characteristics. These characteristics in turn affect how intensely fires may burn, the risk of ignition, and the rate of spread. Anticipating land use change requires an understanding of the complex demands that global markets, national policies, and migration patterns, for example, will create for resources like timber, grain, settlements, livestock, and ecosystem services (Dou et al., 2023; Preinfalk and Handmer, 2024).
Simulations of future land use rely on narratives which seek to parameterise different possible trajectories of humans and the Earth system. One such set of narratives are the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The SSPs were developed to elaborate five envisioned scenarios, each representing potential global trajectories of economics, environment, and ecosystem service provision in light of global climate change. The demands generated can then be spatially allocated to simulate trajectories of LUC. Land use models such as CLUMondo allocate future changes to land systems based on their suitability by way of a series of input attribute values specific to certain land systems. These attributes reflect the land system’s individual suitability in local contexts, ability to provision specific goods, potential for a change in land use, susceptibility to neighbourhood effects, and restrictions to conversion.
More accurate land use scenarios for the 21st century were developed within the FirEUrisk project using CLUMondo under SSP1, “Sustainability,” which explores the effects of policies aimed at a more sustainable future and SSP3, “Regional Rivalry” which anticipates more fragmented national approaches to sustainability in Europe. The land use dataset (available for download at DataverseNL) can then be used within Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM) such as LPJmL-SPITFIRE to simulate the consequences of different socioeconomic pathways on future fire risk. Furthermore, the benefits and trade-offs of targeting specific fuel types by way of fuel-relevant land management strategies are being simulated within this framework. Although early results indicate that reduction of fine fuels may result in the greatest reduction in burned area, practitioners and policy makers will need to carefully assess the consequences for vegetation carbon, an important component in mitigating global climate change.
Ecological vulnerability. Impact of intensified fire regimes on plant abundance, diversity, and fitness
Fire is a natural process in many ecosystems, but the intensification of fire regimes has significant ecological consequences. Plant species and communities are adapted to historical fire regimes, and deviations from these patterns—such as increased fire frequency or severity—can dramatically alter their vulnerability.
Globally, evidence suggests that pushing fire frequency or severity beyond historical extremes negatively impacts plant abundance, diversity, and fitness. While heightened fire severity and frequency both reduce plant abundance, diversity and fitness remain largely unaffected by increased fire frequency. In the short term, intensified fire regimes reduce plant abundance, but this effect diminishes over time, particularly after two years post-fire. Conifer and mixed forests appear especially sensitive to changes in fire regimes, as plants in these ecosystems often lack fire-adaptive traits compared to those in fire-prone shrublands and grasslands. This sensitivity is consistent with the observation that forests, which are less adapted to fire, experience stronger impacts on abundance, diversity, and fitness when fire regimes intensify. Ecosystems in cold climates and temperate regions with dry seasons also show reduced plant abundance and fitness under intensified fire regimes. This pattern may be linked to moisture limitations, which hinder post-fire recovery. In drier climates, compound disturbances—such as fire followed by drought—further exacerbate recovery challenges, amplifying fire effects compared to other regions. In cold climates, where fires are historically rare and recovery is constrained by low temperatures, plants are particularly vulnerable to intensified fire regimes. Overall, the findings underscore the substantial negative effects of intensified fire regimes on plant abundance and fitness in dry and cold climates, as well as on diversity in tropical forests.
While spatial variations in fire activity can enhance biodiversity, this is not necessarily true for temporal variations—as organisms are adapted to the historical fire regime in a given area—and some ecosystems could become less diverse if fire regimes continue to intensify. Given the impracticality of managing entire landscapes continuously, it is essential to identify which ecosystems are most vulnerable and prioritize conservation efforts accordingly.
For further details, refer to the associated publication:
Grau‐Andrés, R., Moreira, B., & Pausas, J. G. (2024). Global plant responses to intensified fire regimes. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 33(8): e13858. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13858
Futture Wildfire Smoke
Climate change is expected to significantly alter fire regimes, leading to changes in the frequency, intensity, and distribution of wildfires. These changes will have profound impacts on air quality and public health due to increased smoke exposure (Clarke et al. 2023; Romanello et al. 2023; van Daalen et al. 2024). In order to better understand the future trends of the distribution of smoke over Europe, future wildfire emissions were assessed based on climatic forecasts of total carbon emissions from wildfires for Europe at 9 km resolution. These forecasts used a Dynamic Vegetation Model coupled with the wildfire model SPITFIRE (Thonicke et al. 2010). The total carbon emissions were converted to the emissions of different air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) using a methodology from the European Environmental Agency (San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. 2023). The increased emissions of CO in some regions in Central Europe are expected to lead to a situation similar to the one of the Mediterranean Regions where wildfire smoke is already a significant problem. Other pollutants that are particularly dangerous for health found within wildfire-smoke such as NOx are predicted to follow the same trend seen in CO.
Return to Conceptual Framework Diagram
Bar-Massada, A., Alcasena, F., Schug, F., Radeloff, V.C., 2023. The wildland – urban interface in Europe: Spatial patterns and associations with socioeconomic and demographic variables. Landsc. Urban Plan. 235, 104759. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104759
Billing, M., Forrest, M., von Bloh, W., Bowring, S., Hetzer, J., Oberhageman, L., Thonicke, K (2023): Projections of future fire and vegetation variables on European scale, GFZ Data Services. https://doi.org/10.5880/pik.2023.005
Dou, Y., Zagaria, C., O’Connor, L., Thuiller, W., Verburg, P.H., 2023. Using the Nature Futures Framework as a lens for developing plural land use scenarios for Europe for 2050. Glob. Environ. Change 83, 102766. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102766
Forrest, M., Hetzer, J., Billing, M., Bowring, S.P.K., Kosczor, E., Oberhagemann, L., Perkins, O., Warren, D., Arrogante-Funes, F., Thonicke, K. & Hickler, T. (2024) Understanding and simulating cropland and non-cropland burning in Europe using the BASE (Burnt Area Simulator for Europe) model. Biogeosciences, 21, 5539-5560. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-5539-2024
Hetzer, J., Forrest, M., Ribalaygua, J., Prado-López, C., Hickler, T., 2024. The fire weather in Europe: large-scale trends towards higher danger. Environ. Res. Lett. 19, 084017. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad5b09
Pantera, A., Doblas, E., Blennow, K., Silva, C., Viorel, B., 2018. Techniques and practices to manage fire risk in the forest (biomass management, Silvopastoralism).
Preinfalk, E., Handmer, J., 2024. Fueling the fires – An exploration of the drivers and the scope for management of European wildfire risk under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Clim. Risk Manag. 45, 100638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2024.100638
San-Miguel-Ayanz J, Steinbrecher R, Ferreiro A, Woodfield M, Simpson D (2023) Forest Fires. In 'EMEP/EEA air pollutant emission inventory guidebook 2023 (Version Guidebook 2023)'. (Ed. EMEP/EEA)
Sil, Â., Fernandes, P.M., Rodrigues, A.P., Alonso, J.M., Honrado, J.P., Perera, A., Azevedo, J.C., 2019. Farmland abandonment decreases the fire regulation capacity and the fire protection ecosystem service in mountain landscapes. Ecosyst. Serv. 36, 100908. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2019.100908
Thonicke K, Spessa A, Prentice I, Harrison SP, Dong L, Carmona-Moreno C (2010) The influence of vegetation, fire spread and fire behaviour on biomass burning and trace gas emissions: results from a process-based model. Biogeosciences 7(6), 1991-2011. doi: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-7-1991-2010
Deliverables within FirEUrisk related to Adaptation are available here https://fireurisk.eu/deliverables/
D3.1 – Downscaled CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate scenarios for selected Pilot Sites and Demonstration Areas
D3.2 – Continental land-use change scenarios and stylised fuel management scenarios for the 21st century
D3.3 – Improved fire regime simulations using hybrid functions in fire models and in fire-enabled DGVMs
D3.4 – Simulated fire and vegetation dynamics at three spatialscales
D3.5 – New dimensions of future fire regimes, extremes and new fire-prone areas
D3.6 – Future vulnerability and exposure to future fire, incl. changes along WUI (Wildland Urban Interface)
D3.7 – Identification of effective adaptation measures