Forest fire images are devastating - but what do they really tell us about climate?
It’s shocking to see the images of any wildfire, the landscape lit by flames or shrouded in an orange mist, and then to hear the stories of the battle by firefighters to put it out, water-bombings, the rescuing of campers from a hill as the fire encroached.
This week’s images from Galloway are reminders that, even here in dreich Scotland, we have a wildfire problem and vigilance is needed, particularly in spring, our peak period for such blazes. We may not be blasted by California’s furnace-fuelling Santa Ana winds, but we are still vulnerable.
But a fire like the one that consumed an area of the Galloway Forest Park, also raises questions. One of the first of these almost always involves climate change. Are such fires getting worse and more frequent because of climate change?
Are they part of a picture of a terrifying and more dangerous world? Or is this just what has always happened, come what may, muirburn or no muirburn, fossil fuel consumption or not?
Back in early March, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) was already warning that most of the country had recorded below-average rainfall over winter following a particularly dry autumn. Orkney, for instance, had experienced just 34% of its typical rainfall.
“The lack of rainfall,” SEPA said, “seen during the winter period poses potential challenges for Scotland’s water resources with the coming spring and summer now relying on an above average rainfall to replenish the low groundwater levels.”
Roll on a month and a blaze has devastated swathes of the Galloway Forest Park. The fire, which, started on Friday morning at Merrick Hill, spread across the landscape to Glen Trool and Loch Doun. Satellite images released by the Met Office showed how the blaze had engulfed a large part of Galloway Forest and the surrounding area. Properties were evacuated. Residents living nearby were advised to keep windows and doors closed.
But, as reports have shown, it was not the only fire in Scotland these past few days. In an extraordinarily busy weekend, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was called out to no less than 90 outdoor fires, including a major grassland blaze at Inverpolly in the Highlands.
And the peril is not over. A very high wildfire risk warning remains in place across Scotland, until Wednesday 9 April and an extreme wildfire warning has been issues for the South West, Eastern, Central and North of Scotland for 10 April.
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So, is it climate change? The answer, almost always with any individual wildfire, is that they are often caused by human activity, but climate change, also anthropogenic, is increasing their frequency globally.
In Scotland, there are the conditions of the moment. It happens that we have had a dry winter, which also happens to follow the hottest year on record, and to include Europe’s hottest ever March. But we also know that prolonged wet weather last year saw large outdoor fire incidents drop from its average of 170 a year to 55 incidents. Weather comes and goes.
The question of what part climate change plays in wildfire patterns was adeptly answered last week by Dr Maria Barbosa, wildfire scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), who said: “The vast majority of wildfires in the UK are started by human activity, whether accidentally or deliberately. While we don’t yet know the exact causes of these recent fires, we do know that once they ignite, they can be very difficult to control, especially with the ongoing dry conditions. This is particularly true in nature reserves, where there is more dry vegetation available to act as fuel for fires, making efforts to tackle them even harder.
“With climate change, we expect fire danger levels to increase across the world, including the UK. The current situation and warnings serve as a reminder of the urgent need to adapt to the greater risks and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to limit future increases in fires.”
Crucially, she uses that word “expect”. We may expect there to be more wildfires, and it is absolutely right that the SFRS are preparing for them, but are we already seeing them here and elsehwere?
One place we can look for an answer to this question is in figures produced by Global Forest Watch on tree loss and fire incidents. A graph created for Scotland over the years between 2001 and now, shows an astonishingly high spike fire alerts on satellite data over this past month unlike any other year for the same period. The only similar spike can be found in May 2019, the year that saw 22 square miles of the Flow Country burned.
What do wildfires tell us about climate change? (Image: Derek Macarthur)
But what is also revealing is that graphs on the site show that over the past 23 years tree loss due to fire has fallen. 2009 actually experienced the highest tree loss with 1.97 kha lost to fires — 7.9% of all tree cover loss for that year.” 2023, in spite of being the year of the Cannich wildfire, which torched 20 square miles of wood and scrubland, only, it says, saw 22ha of tree loss.
Something similar is also revealed in a Scottish Government 2021 report covering all wildfires, which shows no pattern of increase, and states that “overall, there are no indications of the presence of an increasing or decreasing trend over time in the number of wildfires occurring in Scotland based on the IRS records”.
That isn’t the case in some other parts of the world, where according to a graph produced by the World Resources Institute (WRI), global tree loss to fire is rising. In 2003, 4.49 million acres were lost, in 2013 6.98 million, and in 2023 11.9 million acres.
Most of this, the WRI article explains has occurred in boreal regions, countries like Canada and Russia, where fire-related tree cover loss increased by a rate of about 138,000 hectares, around 3.6%, per year over the last 23 years.
In 2023, for instance, wildfires in Canada burned almost a record-breaking 7.8 million hectares of tree cover, releasing nearly 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (about the same amount as India generated from fossil fuel use the previous year).
“Climate change,” the article says, “is the main cause of increasing fire activity in boreal forests. Northern high-latitude regions are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet, which contributes to longer fire seasons, greater fire frequency and severity and larger burned areas.”
It also notes: “Climate change clearly plays an important role in driving more frequent and intense fires, especially in boreal forests. As such, there is no solution for bringing fire activity back down to historical levels without drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions and breaking the fire-climate feedback loop.”
Another study, led by University of East Anglia, found that emissions from forest fires have surged by 60% globally since 2001, and almost tripled in some of the northern boreal forests.
Of course, it’s not only trees that we lose to fire, there is also heath, grassland and peatland, and perhaps most significant of these in terms of Scotland’s contribution to climate change through fire, is the peat.
In a recent paper University of Cambridge researchers found that despite accounting for only a quarter of the total UK land area that burns each year, dwarfed by moor and heathland, wildfires that burn peat have caused up to 90% of annual UK fire-driven carbon emissions since 2001 – with emissions spikes in particularly dry years.
The researchers also found that the UK’s ‘fire season’ has lengthened dramatically since 2011, from between one and four months in the years 2011-2016 to between six and nine months in the years 2017-2021. The change was most marked in Scotland, where almost half of all UK fires occur.
So, what does all this tell us? It’s a reminder of two things.
To be vigilant, and avoid fire risks, for instance smoking and barbecue in our drier periods, in order to preserve our natural landscapes. But also not to forget those feedback loops of nature, and be aware that if we don’t take control of our carbon emissions now, nature will take them still further out of our control.