Welcome to the fifth Giraffe Team Bulletin!
Approximately every two months, we share a Giraffe Team bulletin, providing you with an update on the latest from each of our six teams. However this fifth bulletin covers approx 4 months, as we did not publish one over the summer.
We hope you enjoy the bulletins and that it helps you keep abreast of our research. Please do get in touch if you want to find out more about anything in the bulletin (either wildfire@imperial.ac.uk or contact the researchers involved).
You can find out more about each one of the “Giraffe Teams”, including their overall aims and objectives, and specific projects, here.
Just Fire Giraffe Team
On June 17th and 18th, Kate Schreckenberg and Abi Croker hosted two panel sessions on ‘Commons aflame: Collective fire management’ at the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Across the two days we had 13 presentations from around the world, including from Cathy Smith, Kapil Yadav, Rahina Alare Sidiki, Max Stiefel and Adriana Ford from the Just Fires group. It was great to see huge interest – even from those not working on fire-related issues – in applying some of the Commons theory to landscape fire management. Building on the Centre’s experience of using arts-based methods we included a half-hour interactive arts-based session to change the pace in each panel. A highlight for participants on the second day was the guest appearance, courtesy of Leslie Boby (of the Southern Regional Extension Forestry office in Georgia), of Smokey Bear (“Only YOU can prevent forest fires!”), created in 1944 and now one of the US’s most recognised advertising icons. Leslie then encouraged us all to come up with slogans or mascots reflecting our own take on fire resulting, amongst others, in the wonderful ‘Pyro’ the pinecone from the online group (making use of Max’s AI skills) and the BFF riff from Kate and Abi (‘Burn together, Friends Forever’). The latter summed up a clear message from the two sessions that landscape fire management is a collaborative undertaking that needs to engage positively with all landscape managers and users.
Photos: Example mascot and slogans produced in the IASC workshop, “Commons aflame: Collective fire management”
In May, Amos Chege Muthiuru led the first workshop on the project to advance integration of indigenous knowledge into wildfire management in multi-use landscapes of southern Kenya. With James Millington and David Demeritt supporting and contributing, the workshop engaged with ~20 representatives of local communities and indigenous peoples and a similar number of representatives of NGOs charities and local government. Through Chege’s endeavours the workshop made it into local and national news outlets. One notable outcome was the submission of a jointly written comment on the draft of Kenya’s Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill 2025, which was open for consultation at the time of the workshop and which, in the view of workshop participants, had limited and inadequate consideration of fire as an ecosystem process. You can read the full submitted comment here. Chege was also able to show James and David his study site in Tsavo West National Park, where he is examining the impact of fire on human-elephant conflict. Read more about the workshop and the field visit here. Lookout for more on activities from these projects as they progress.
Photos: Workshop in Tsavo, Kenya
Keeping with the arts theme, June saw the unveiling of the ‘Flames of Duality’ artwork by Daniel Kwaku Anetang on a billboard in Damongo, Northern Ghana. This resulted from a multi-stakeholder workshop on equitable fire management held in October 2024, which also gave rise to a policy brief.
Photos: The “Flames of Duality” mural was unveiled in Damongo, Ghana.
Will Hayes has been in Ireland over the summer doing fieldwork with farmers on fire. Will’s fieldwork in West Cork and Kerry, interviewing upland farmers, is highlighting key shifts in land use and fire risk. Most farmers agree the uplands are no longer grazed as they once were. While this under-grazing allows some natural succession and biodiversity to develop, it also leaves unchecked vast tracts of Molinia and gorse, highly flammable vegetation that, once ignited, can spread fire across thousands of hectares. Farmers link these changes to rural depopulation, policy shifts, and the decline of full-time hill farming, with many younger farmers keeping livestock only on the lowlands, and as a part time job on the side. Views on fire differ; some see controlled burning as essential for creating firebreaks, while others prefer low-intensity grazing or avoiding fire altogether. This research is shedding light on the complex choices facing upland communities and the urgent need to balance farming, ecology, and fire risk.
Photos: Fieldwork in Ireland – Will Hayes (RHUL)
And finally, three papers have recently been published from work in the team:
- Work led by Ol Perkins with the Wildfire Human Agency Model (WHAM!) has been published in Earth’s Future in a paper entitled, ‘The Spatial Distribution and Temporal Drivers of Changing Global Fire Regimes: A Coupled Socio-Ecological Modeling Approach’.
- The paper led by Cathy Smith on the global expert elicitation on present-day human–fire interactions has been published in Philosophical Transactions B.
- Ol, Olivia and James have published a paper in Environmental Research Letters that combines previous centre work to examine the impact of livestock farming on global fire regimes.
Fire-Veg Giraffe Team
Update coming soon
Climate Giraffe Team
Following our recently published work on the large-scale atmospheric impacts of the extreme 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke, we delved into another related question: what can be the impacts of these extreme wildfires on photovoltaic (PV) production? We therefore used the EC-Earth3 model simulations that were part of the aforementioned paper to compare photovoltaic output throughout the Northern Hemisphere with (FIRE) and without (noFIRE) wildfire emissions for the core 5-month period of the fires (May-September). The emitted aerosols lead to a blocking of a sizeable percentage of solar radiation that would have otherwise contributed to PV production in the areas of interest, which are Canada, the United States, and Europe. At the same time, the aerosol effects also lead to a surface cooling effect which slightly compensates for the PV production deficit, as PV installations function more efficiently at lower temperatures, and this effect is also accounted for in the final analysis. We then use the radiation difference (FIRE – noFIRE) to estimate PV production deficit, the burden due to this deficit, and the market cost of this deficit, for each country, state or county. In total (Europe, USA and Canada), the modelled 5-monthly effects of the emissions are as follows: 6.39 TWh deficit (approximately the annual electricity consumption of Luxembourg), a burden of 2034 tons of , and a monetary deficit of 1.311 billion euros (for reference, in 2023, wildfires had an estimated impact of 4.1 billion euros in Europe not accounting for the deficit calculated in this study). A representation of the European part of the analysis can be seen in the figure shown here.
Air Quality Giraffe Team
Several of the team have been busy undertaking experiments in the Combustion Chamber for emissions measurements. These experiments enable comparisons to be made between field and lab-based measurements using the same instrumentation, plus additional detail of emissions through use of a wider range of instruments in the lab compared to what is possible in the field.
Planning and preparation are well underway for an upcoming project in Brazil which includes a focus on measurements of fires and their emissions within the Amazon region. A recce trip took place in May including visits to field sites, and logistical preparation with our project collaborators. More details to follow.
Along with several other Centre members from other teams, Mark Grosvenor presented at the Fire in the Earth System Congress, in Lisbon. Mark presented latest estimates of health impacts from fire smoke in the Upper SE Asian region.
Also in June, several of the team presented at the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Vienna. Toby Wainwright, Farrer Owsley-Brown and Luke Richardson-Foulger each presented their research on topics including: evaluating air quality models with in-situ sensors in extreme haze conditions; differentiating flaming and smouldering combustion using hyperspectral EO methods; characteristics and quality of airborne reference measurements for EO fire product evaluation; and the impact of extreme peatland wildfires on carbon sequestration.
Fire Info Giraffe Team
A lot of the Fire Infor GT activity has been in the planning of a field campaign in the Brazilian Amazon that has just concluded for this year. The field campaign included collecting in situ and airborne data on fire emissions, as well as airborne data collection over large areas that have been subjected to fire and deforestation over the years, with the aim of studying the effects of vegetation recovery in the Amazon. As part of this project, a new activity has kicked off that will provide an online dashboard for fire activity and emissions over Brazil using all of KCL’s thermal data. More details to follow.
A number of studies are ongoing and in the process of being submitted for publication. They include Will Maslanka’s FREM method extension to boreal latitudes using polar sensors, studies from Z Liu on fire emissions in Laos and India/Pakistan, and work on FRP by Jose Gomez-Dans.
Oct 2025 (following July and Sept 2025 Leadership Team Science Meetings)
Thank you to all the Giraffe Team leads for providing the updates.
