Leverhulme Wildfires Centre

The tropics are key to global biogeo-chemical cycles, host the greatest range of ecosystems and biodiversity, and are central to the United Nations REDD+ forest and climate protection programme. Satellite data suggest they contain ~80% of the ~3.5 million km2 of land burned annually worldwide. But the heterogeneous character of tropical wildfires, ranging from vast savanna burning to deforestation and peatland fires, means they remain poorly quantified. This Strand includes projects that aim to develop novel methods in order to study the drivers and impacts of wildfires in specific tropical regions that of particular interest and poorly understood.

Boreal regions remain a central mystery for the future of our planet. Climate change is occurring most rapidly at these high latitudes, helping to increase the frequency, size, and severity of wildfires in the vast circumpolar boreal forests, which comprise 29% of global forest cover. Beyond their impacts on local communities, shifting fire regimes across the North may trigger other changes in major biome distributions and carbon sources and sinks that could accelerate global climate change. In this Strand, we have designed projects that study changing fire regimes at northern regions, the sociopolitical causes and implications of such changes, and their effects on global carbon budgets and climate change.

Human settlements at the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) are expanding worldwide, exposing more people and property to wildfire risks that are complex to assess and difficult to manage. In places such as the US and Australia, as in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, most of the direct economic losses from the recent wildfires (and all of the fatalities) occurred at the WUI. The drivers of WUI wildfire are contested, as are the potential steps for reducing risk. In this Strand of projects, we will conduct comparative case studies linking the physical reality to the social and institutional context of land-use and fire management in order to tease out the causes of wildfire risk, as well as understand the optimum ways of managing wildfires at different WUI contexts in the future.

Wildfires influence the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry and air quality, climate, ecosystems, and economies. Regional differences in the environmental, ecological, economic and policy contexts of fire are exceedingly important, but ultimately have to be understood in a global context – considering how human activities influence and are conditioned by global economic and environmental systems and services. Furthermore, given its influence on so many environmental processes, wildfire must be represented in Earth System models realistically. This Strand includes a range of projects that aim to integrate all the region-specific knowledge and information obtained from the other strands, in order to understand fire and its consequences from a global perspective.