NEW YORK, Europe Brief News – Extreme wildfires are set to become more frequent, a new UN report has found.
The wildfires will increase by around 50% by the end of this century, the report added.
The report finds there’s an elevated risk in the Arctic and other regions previously unaffected by fires.
The scientists define extreme fires as extraordinary conflagrations that occur roughly once in a hundred years.
Researchers say that rising temperatures and changes to the way we use land will drive the increase.
The new study calls for a radical reallocation of financial resources from fighting fires to prevention.
The scientists from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) say that large fires that burn for weeks are already becoming hotter and burning longer in many parts of the planet where wildfires have always occurred.
But they are now beginning to flare up in remote northern areas, in drying peatlands and on thawing permafrost.
This latest study says that there will be a global increase in extreme fires of up to 14% by 2030, compared to the number recorded in 2010-2020. The increase could reach 30% by 2050 and 50% by the end of the century.
“The analysis was based on the definition of a catastrophic fire being one that would occur once every 100 years. So it’s a very low frequency fire event,” said Dr Andrew Sullivan from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia.
“The result was that the potential for that sort of fire would increase by a factor of 1.3 to 1.5 times, based on global analysis of fire frequency.”
The results were similar in a low or high carbon emissions scenario.
