Part Two / How our Planet is Changing

2.16 Wildfires

All online sources accessed on

  1. evidence for dangerous fire weather conditions Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Technical summary’, in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. P. R. Shukla et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/about/how-to-cite-this-report; Seneviratne, S. I., et al., ‘Weather and climate extreme events in a changing climate’, in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/; Ranasinghe, R., et al., ‘Climate change information for regional impact and for risk assessment’, in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), doi: 10.1017/9781009157896.014.

    human influence on fire weather conditions has already emerged Abatzoglou, J. T., et al., ‘Global emergence of anthropogenic climate change in fire weather indices’, Geophysical Research Letters, 46 (1), 2019: 326–36, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL080959.

    the area affected at 3°C above pre-industrial levels Ibid.

    21 per cent of Australia’s temperate forests burned Boer, M. M., et al., ‘Unprecedented burn area of Australian mega forest fires’, Nature Climate Change, 10 (3), 2020: 171–2, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0716-1.

    megafires burnt a phenomenal 24 million hectares Van der Velde, I. R., et al., ‘Vast CO2 release from Australian fires in 2019–2020 constrained by satellite’, Nature, 597 (7876), 2021: 366–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03712-y; Nolan, R. H., et al., ‘What do the Australian Black Summer fires signify for the global fire crisis?’, Fire, 4 (4), 2021: Article 97, https://doi.org/10.3390/fire4040097.

  2. 3 billion animals were killed or displaced Nolan et al., ‘What do the Australian Black Summer fires signify for the global fire crisis?’; Collins, L., et al., ‘The 2019–2020 mega-fires exposed Australian ecosystems to an unprecedented extent of high-severity fire’, Environmental Research Letters, 16 (4), 2021: Article 044029, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abeb9e.

    Temperatures in the Canadian town of Lytton World Meteorological Organization, State of Global Climate 2021: WMO Provisional Report, 2021, https://library.wmo.int/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=21982#.Yd-bCS0RrUI.

    a record 6.45 billion tonnes of CO2 Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, ‘Wildfires wreaked havoc in 2021, CAMS tracked their impact’, 6 December 2021, https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/wildfires-wreaked-havoc-2021-cams-tracked-their-impact; Friedlingstein, P., et al., ‘Global carbon budget 2021’, Earth System Science Data, 14 (4), 2022: 1917–2005, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022.

    over double the European Union’s total carbon dioxide emissions Friedlingstein, et al., ‘Global Carbon Budget 2021’.