Changing climate – changing fire
Climate change is affecting both the nature of fire, and our interactions with it. Predicted hotter and drier climates for Australia will modify wildfire intensity, extent, frequency, and seasonality. Human populations are also rapidly expanding, placing greater demands on ecosystem services, and increasing encounter rates between people and fire. Recent wildfire disasters around the world are stark reminders of the urgent need to improve our preparedness for changing fire regimes.
Managing future fire regimes requires broad scale thinking
While fire as a process drives regeneration in ecosystems worldwide, altered fire regimes can lead to profound ecosystem change and the approaches to managing these changes can be contested. Given this, a better understanding of how we will manage, and live with, future fire regimes is a key area of research focus. Addressing future fire regimes requires broad, transdisciplinary thinking across big temporal and spatial scales.
Future Fire research themes are wide ranging
The Future Fire program is an emerging capability within the FLARE Wildfire Research Group and seeks to take longer-term views and work across a range of disciplines.
It will develop the following areas of research and allow us to:
- predict and anticipate the key threats posed by future fire patterns
- explore how institutions will strategically manage change and the novel challenges from future fires
- address the dynamic interdependencies between fire, climate, society, and environment values
- provide a forum to explore the desirable futures
- have both a national and international research scope
