Future Fire

Predicted hotter and drier climates will modify wildfire intensity, extent, frequency, and seasonality. The Future Fires program will use strategic foresight and cutting-edge models to anticipate and help prepare for the wildfires of the future.

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

Projects we are currently working on in this field

Decision support for climate-adapted bushfire risk mitigation

As climate change intensifies bushfire risks, there is an urgent need for fire management tools that remain effective in a warming world. This project aims to optimise the delivery of current risk mitigation tools and identify pathways to ...

Integrated strategic bushfire management in a changing climate

Climate change is projected to make bushfire conditions worse in Victoria and increase the frequency and severity of fire events. The advances made through risk-based approaches to bushfire management have been significant and have contributed ...

Towards a shared understanding of future fire

We have entered an era which some call the Pyrocene. It is a time of escalating and increasingly complex interactions between humans and fire. If we are to live with fire, we must understand it and how it is changing in response to both global ...

Climatology of overnight fire weather conditions in south-eastern Australia

This project builds on a related project - Overnight fire weather conditions in NSW during Black Summer - to explore spatial and temporal patterns in overnight fire weather conditions in south-eastern Australia. It will help to build up a ...

Fire management approaches to mitigate the impacts of bushfires on ecological values

This project explores the ability of fuel management activities to mitigate bushfire impacts on ecological values. It does this through the integration of the landscape simulation modelling software ‘Fire Regimes and Operations Simulations ...

Future fire regimes and their impact on mammal populations

Fire drives patterns in mammal biodiversity across the globe.  However, due to climate change fire regimes are shifting and this impacts species and their populations. It is important we gain a better understanding of how species are affected ...

Assessing impacts of fire regime intensification in fire-adapted forests

Sclerophyll forests in southeast Australia have typically evolved alongside fire, and generally recover from single fire events. Anthropogenic climate change is increasing fire prevalence which means these forests are increasingly exposed to ...

Restoration of eucalypt forest in Wilsons Promontory National Park- Implications for forest values and site and landscape flammability

Wilsons Promontory provides an example of how repeated short interval fires can prevent the regeneration of a Eucalyptus canopy in a range of ecological vegetation classes. The ‘destocking’ of forests can dramatically alter the composition, ...

Doughnut pyronomics: The safe space for co-existing with fires in the 21st century

The Doughnut Economics framework, developed by Kate Raworth, attempts to reimagine our modern economy in the shape of the doughnut, where the “safe and just space for humanity” lies between the inner circle of social foundations necessary for ...

Other Capabilities

Fire Risk Modelling

Fire risk modelling provides robust calculations of risk at local and landscape scales. This helps to guide decision-making and management for assets including people, property, economic, environmental, cultural and infrastructure.

Fire Behaviour

Fire behaviour research considers the mechanisms of fire spread across the landscape. Uncovering the physics behind it through innovative and novel approaches helps us develop and improve predictive models of fire behaviour.

Landscape Flammability

Environmental and human factors can strongly influence fire behaviour by changing the vegetation. Understanding the role of these influencing factors and the contribution of vegetation itself to fire behaviour is vital to better estimate landscape flammability.