Cómo influye el cambio climático antropogénico en el comportamiento de los incendios forestales en la península ibérica

Abstract

Climate change affects wildfire spread both by increasing fuel dryness and by causing changes in vegetation. However, the direct effect of global warming on wildfires is hard to quantify due to the multiple non-climatic factors involved in their ignition and spread. By combining wildfire observations with the latest generation of climate models, we show that in more than half of the large wildfires (area>500 ha) that took place in the Iberian Peninsula between 2001 and 2021 there is a significant increase in the rate of spread with respect to what it would have been in the pre-industrial period, attributable to global warming. The influence of enhanced vegetation growth on the increase in the rate of spread since the pre-industrial period could potentially be even higher than that of the temperature increase. We also show that other parameters associated with wildfire behaviour, such as heat release or flame length, also show the same climate change-induced amplification effect.