Wildfire-Workshop-Presentation-Colin-Prentice

1. Wildfire and climate change –
a hazy outlook?
Iain Colin Prentice
Imperial College London
Director, The Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires,
Environment and Society

2. Basic principles
• Primary production => fuel builds up
• Hot and dry weather => fuel dries
• Ignition source => fuel starts to burn
Most fires don’t spread.
Ignition isn’t “the cause” of fire.
Crops and grazing can stop fires spreading.

3. To make valid predictions we need…
• Data
• Models
• Skill (models should predict the data – at
least!)

4. What do we have?
• A very short (< 20 years) global record, with
large differences between “products”
• Models based on limited evidence, with large
differences between models
• Models with limited skill at predicting the
data we have

5. Model responses to fuel and moisture
Teckentrup et al. (2019) Biogeosciences

6. Model responses to population
Teckentrup et al. (2019) Biogeosciences
suppression -> duration suppression -> size
ignition -> probability of fire start

7. Models vs data: half full or half empty?
Forkel et al. (2019)
Biogeosciences

8. Charcoal over 2000 years
Marlon et al. (2008) Nature Geoscience

9. Charcoal, biomass-burning
CH4 and temperature
Harrison et al. (2018)
Earth System Dynamics

10. Recent downward trend
Andela et al.
(2017) Science

11. Science directions
• Improvement of data products
• Improvement of models, especially for
vegetation properties
• New mechanisms needed, to ensure real
progress in either field!

12. Policy dimensions
Wildfire is not going away, and will increase in
many regions!
1) Address climate change (but not by planting
trees!)
2) Re-think insurance and spatial planning –
flammable vegetation and people don’t mix!