Publication:
Exacerbated fires in Mediterranean Europe due to anthropogenic warming projected with non-stationary climate-fire models

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Date
2018
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Authors
Turco, Marco ; Rosa-Cánovas, Juan José ; Bedia, Joaquín ; Jerez, Sonia ; Montávez, Juan Pedro ; Llasat, Maria-Carmen ; Provenzale, Antonello
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Publisher
Nature Research
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06358-z
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract
The observed trend towards warmer and drier conditions in southern Europe is projected to continue in the next decades, possibly leading to increased risk of large fires. However, an assessment of climate change impacts on fires at and above the 1.5 °C Paris target is still missing. Here, we estimate future summer burned area in Mediterranean Europe under 1.5, 2, and 3 °C global warming scenarios, accounting for possible modifications of climate-fire relationships under changed climatic conditions owing to productivity alterations. We found that such modifications could be beneficial, roughly halving the fire-intensifying signals. In any case, the burned area is robustly projected to increase. The higher the warming level is, the larger is the increase of burned area, ranging from ~40% to ~100% across the scenarios. Our results indicate that significant benefits would be obtained if warming were limited to well below 2 °C.
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Citation
Nature Communications 9, 3821 (2018)
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