Present and future fire risk changes in Central Europe

Abstract

Fire risk is projected to increase under future climate change. Most projections focus on fire-prone regions, such as the Mediterranean-type ecosystems, whereas little attention has been paid to regions of low fire risk such as Central Europe. Here, future projections of fire risk which are tailor-made for its specific conditions are scarce. With our study we aim to fill this gap. We use meteorological station data and interpolated climate datasets to compute future fire risk for Central Europe (covering Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic) using the Fire Weather Index. In a next step, we analyse the spatial distribution of reported fire ignitions to identify additional drivers that can explain the spatial pattern of fire ignition and risk, or accelerate fire risk under climate extremes (drought or extreme heat). We analyse how transport infrastructure and proximity to settlements have influenced fire ignition in Central Europe and compare it against relationships known from fire-prone regions. We aim to build on recent adjustments of the FWI to account for respective increased fire risk and apply it to our study area. We conduct high-resolution analysis of fire-risk analysis by computing the FWI along the wildland-urban and wildland-rural interface in individual sites in the study region. In a next step, downscaled future climate scenarios (CMIP6) are applied to compute changes in future fire risk for the entire study area as well as the selected sites in Central Europe. Uncertainty ranges of future fire risk projections will be covered by using several climate scenarios for the entire study region. Detailed analysis will be conducted at the local scale by further refining changes in ignition potentials along the wildland-urban and the wildland-rural interface in selected sites in Central Europe under climate change conditions.