Wildfire has many faces. The record-setting blazes this summer in Canada, California and Greece have focused attention on its destructive power, but there are also positive features. Many species and ecosystems have co-evolved with fire and depend on it. People have always harnessed fire, but in recent decades it has been used on a large scale to transform vast expanses of forests into crop fields or pastures.
Fire risks depend on the interaction of ecology and human behaviour. But weather and climate are also extremely important. Even very slight, natural shifts in climate over the past millennium have caused large variations in biomass burned. But the scale of recent very large, damaging wildfires is unprecedented, and there is growing concern that this is becoming the ‘new normal’ in a warming world.
Changes in fire regimes can also alter the energy balance of the Earth and the global carbon cycle – but these planetary-scale interactions of wildfire, carbon and climate are barely understood at all. Our limited understanding of wildfire dynamics represents a major stumbling block for projecting future climate changes, as well as for managing fire and its impacts in the present day.
The Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society is proposed as a game-changer, radically transforming the scientific and practical understanding of wildfire as a coupled social, ecological and physical process, and becoming the go-to-place for wildfire research and expertise worldwide
The Centre’s day-to-day work will be organized into four Strands focusing on major topics/regions of interest (S1: Fire in the Tropics; S2: Fire in the North; S3: Fire at the Wildland-Urban-Interface’; S4: Fire
in Global Systems)
PI Lead : Dr Sean Beevers
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