Fire is a natural part of life on Earth, sustaining healthy and balanced ecosystems worldwide. But human activity and a changing climate are rapidly shifting both the frequency and severity of wildfire events, creating new risks to human and environmental health. 

FLARE (Fire Science Learning AcRoss the Earth System), a new initiative led by researchers from Future Earth’s SOLAS and in collaboration with iLEAPS, Global Carbon Project, and PAGES Global Research Networks is responding to these urgent challenges by taking a holistic and global view of fire’s interactions and impacts. The experts from 14 countries and across various disciplines have released a paper summarizing the current state of fire science and identifying future challenges. 

The paper compiles discussions from a workshop supported by the European Space Agency-Future Earth Joint Programme, PAGES, and BIOS held in September 2023 at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science

Main Challenges:

• Net Carbon Balance of Fire: Understanding how fire’s carbon release, ecological recovery, changes in climate, ocean biology, and ice melt interact and affect the Earth’s carbon balance. 

• Rapid response to wildfire events: Developing tools for more timely and responsive answers to critical questions during extreme fire events and providing an annual report on key policy and media questions. 

• Implications of Fire Project: Exploring how fires affect marginalized and underrepresented communities, emphasizing Indigenous populations and environmental justice. 

“If we want to improve the assessment of future fire impacts on people and the planet, we need to start with a better understanding of how climate, land cover changes, and human land management practices drive fire distribution and severity in the coming decades,” says Douglas Hamilton, assistant professor of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Science at North Carolina State University. 

A main goal in the paper is to improve fire modeling, prediction, and mitigation from regional to global scales, but Hamilton also hopes FLARE will help foster transdisciplinary science and recruitment of future fire scientists. “There simply are not enough scientists in this field to do the work,” Hamilton says. 

The paper reflects on diverse challenges from satellite data integration, to fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and social science research, with a focus on the contributions of early career researchers and fire managers. It calls for better communication across scientific disciplines, and between science and society to enhance understanding and management of fire.

“Fire has always been there in the Earth System, what’s new is how it is being affected by and affecting humans in the context of wider planetary change,” says Sophie Hebden, research coordinator at the Swedish Hub of Future Earth. “By bringing together the different global research networks of Future Earth we were able to address these challenges across research silos and outline a transdisciplinary research agenda for the global fire community,” says Hebden.

The FLARE working group continues its efforts beyond the workshop, with the white paper now accepted for presentation at the ICDC11 conference (11th International Carbon Dioxide Conference).

About FLARE

The Fire science Learning AcRoss the Earth System (FLARE) Working Group was launched after a Future Earth COP27 side event on fire. The group aims to advance fire science through a transdisciplinary approach. By bringing together diverse expertise, FLARE seeks to promote integrated research addressing the complex and interconnected challenges posed by fire in the Earth System.

Reference: Hamilton, D. S., Kelley, D., Perron, M. M. G., Llort, J., Burton, C., Bergas-Masso, E., Ligouri-Bills, N., Barkley, A., Buchholz, R., Diez, S., Dintwe, K., Forkel, M., Hall, J., Hantson, S., Hayman, G., Hebden, S., Jones, M. W., Kulkarni, C., Nowell, B., … Volker, C. (2024). Igniting Progress: Outcomes from the FLARE workshop and three challenges for the future of transdisciplinary fire science. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12634068