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.
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
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
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