Fire impacts and management

Climate change and unsustainable land-use practices are causing megafires in South America. Here we call for rigorous scientific coordination and global cooperation to claim back landscape planning, mitigate fire risk and foster resilience in the region.

Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

Carcinogenic heavy metals are an underappreciated public health concern from wildfire. Fire severity, geology, and ecosystem type influence landscape-scale production of hexavalent chromium, concentrated in wind-dispersible particles.

Wildfires have caused widespread and increasingly severe losses within timber-producing forests in recent decades, according to maps of logging activity and wildfires.

About two thirds of coniferous forest in the western United States are projected to be exposed to changes in fire frequency, burn severity, and productivity under a 2 °C increase scenario, but increased fire resistance could reduce burn severity in many of these forests, suggests an analysis of model projections based on climate analogs.

Fire reduces the area of Amazon forest regrowth after forest dieback due to deforestation by between 56 and 82%, according to an analysis of fire-enabled Earth system model simulations driven by scenarios of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Biomass combustion smoke transported from Africa accounts for about 60% of black carbon concentrations in the central Amazon during the rainy season, according to long-term measurements of refractory black carbon in 2019 and 2020

Enhanced dust emissions are associated with more than half of the global large wildfire events occurring between 2003 and 2020, according to analyses of satellite measurements of aerosol abundance following more than 150,000 global wildfires.

Land management scenarios that restore degraded swamp shrubland areas to swamp forest through blocking minor canal systems could substantially reduce peatland fire occurrence and associated greenhouse gas emissions, according to a machine learning and numerical modelling study.

Prescribed burning is a common tool to mitigate the risk of dangerous wildfires. However, careful consideration of the public health impacts should be incorporated into forest management plans.

Remote-sensing estimates of fires and the estimated geographic ranges of thousands of plant and vertebrate species in the Amazon Basin reveal that fires have impacted the ranges of 77–85% of threatened species over the past two decades.

Vegetation fires are integral to some ecosystems but can be economically and environmentally destructive. This Review discusses contemporary and future fire regimes, adaptation to fire in the Anthropocene and the need for increased transdisciplinary research to achieve better fire management.