About us - Leverhulme Wildfires Centre Leverhulme Wildfires Centre

The Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society is collaboration between Imperial College London, King’s College London, the University of Reading, and Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2019-2029. Our aim is to radically transform the scientific and practical understanding of wildfire, so that society can understand, predict and manage wildfire more effectively in the future.

Our collective expertise includes Earth system processes, numerical modelling, earth observations and data analytics, and geographies of land use. We were the first in the world to address the multi-scaled challenges of wildfire in a comprehensive, global and transdisciplinary context, bringing together all of these disciplines. Integrating approaches from the social and natural sciences, we are developing a new field of research in which understanding of the human, physical and ecological dimensions of wildfire will advance together.

Objectives and Research Themes

In the first five years (‘Phase 1’), from 2019-2024, the Centre’s day-to-day work was organised into four strands focusing on major topics of interest: Fire in the Tropics; Fire in the North; Fire at the Wildland-Urban-Interface; Fire in Global Systems. In the second phase of the Centre (‘Phase 2’), from 2024-2029, we are working across six goal-orientated teams. However, underlying all our research are four key objectives:

Understanding Fire: What social and environmental factors and feedbacks govern wildfire regimes, including the sources, frequency, intensity, timing, and spatial pattern of fire on the landscape, past and present?
Predicting Fire: How can we incorporate new biophysical understanding, social learning and realistic human-environment dynamics so as to model fire regimes and associated patterns of land cover change more accurately, credibly, and accountably?
Quantifying Impacts: How are people, the places and properties they value, and the resources and ecosystem services they rely on (including biodiversity, air quality, carbon sources/sinks, and climate), affected by wildfire and by changes in the regimes governing it?
Living with Fire: What does wildfire mean to different social groups, and what changes in fire regimes and associated landscapes and management practices would be culturally, politically, environmentally, and economically acceptable to whom – and why?

These are being pursued through interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory research, from the local to global scales, and by training a large cohort of early career researchers, thus nurturing a new generation of fire scientists.