Journal Article

Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth

Williamson, Grant J., Cunningham, Calum X., Bowman, David M. J. S.

2024

Overview

Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters. Analysis of fire radiative power derived from satellite data finds that the frequency of extreme fire events increased 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023 and that these increases were mostly driven by extreme fires in temperate conifer and boreal forest biomes.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 631/158/2465 / 704/158/2465 / Biogeography / Biological and Physical Anthropology / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Boreal forests / Brief Communication / Carbon sequestration / Climate change / Conifers / Earth / Ecology / Ecosystems / Evolutionary Biology / Fire resistance / Forest & brush fires / Generalized linear models / Life Sciences / Paleontology / Trends / Wildfires / Zoology