Climate Change and Early Warning Systems for Wildland Fire - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 123

Reduction, and contribute to implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action.
By using longer-term forecast data from advanced numerical weather models, and
early warning products that are further enhanced with satellite data, the global sys-
tem provides extra time to coordinate suppression resource-sharing and mobiliza-
tion within and between countries in advance of disaster conditions.

Keywords Changing fi re regimes • Fire danger rating • Fire weather • Forecasting
• Presuppression preparedness • Wildfi re disaster

7.1 Global Wildland Fire

Fire has been an integral part of the Earth system for hundreds of millions of years,
affecting global biome distribution and being used by humans through history to
modify the world they live in (Bond et al. 2005 ; Bowman et al. 2009 ; Pyne 2001 ).
Fire plays an important ecological role as it infl uences ecosystem patterns and pro-
cesses, and has substantial environmental effects with a global scale impact through
its infl uence on the carbon cycle and climate. Fire fi rst occurs in the charcoal record
shortly after the appearance of terrestrial plants (Scott and Glasspool 2006 ) and
throughout history, wherever humans traveled, fi re soon followed. Even today, little
has changed as fi re occurs wherever there is vegetation and the vast majority of
global area burned is the result of human-caused fi re.
Charcoal evidence indicates that global wildland fi re has increased since the last
glacial maximum about 21,000 years ago, with increased spatial heterogeneity dur-
ing the last 12,000 years (Power et al. 2008 ). Wildland fi res currently burn 330-
431 M ha of global vegetation every year (Giglio et al. 2010 ). Most wildland fi res
occur in tropical grasslands and savannahs (86 %), and a smaller amount in forests
(11 %) (Mouillot and Field 2005 ). In the last few decades, there is evidence of
greater area burned and increasing fi re severity in many different global regions
(Pyne 2001 ; FAO 2007 ; Bowman et al. 2009 ). There are varied reasons for regional
increases in wildland fi re activity, but the primary factors are fuels, climate/weather,
ignition agents, and people (Flannigan et al. 2005 , 2009b ). During the last millen-
nium, the global fi re regime appears to have been strongly driven by precipitation,
and shifted to an anthropogenic-driven regime during the Industrial Revolution
(Pechony and Shindell 2010 ).

7.2 Climate Change and Future Global Fire Regimes

Future fi re regimes are expected to be temperature driven (Gillett et al. 2004 ;
Pechony and Shindell 2010 ) with warmer conditions and longer fi re seasons lead-
ing to increased area burned and fi re occurrence (Flannigan et al. 2009b ) and an
unprecedentedly fi re-prone environment in the twenty-fi rst century (Pechony and