Wildfire Risk Modeling Under Future Climate Projections in Mediterranean Ecosystems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22802630Keywords:
wildfire risk, fire weather index, Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, fuel moisture, burned area projection, Mediterranean climate, CMIP6, EURO-CORDEX, drought-driven fire regimeAbstract
Fire weather in the Mediterranean Basin is projected to intensify as regional warming and summer drying outpace
the global average, but the magnitude of that intensification, and its translation into burned area, remains poorly
quantified at the sub-regional scale relevant to fire management planning. We computed the Canadian Forest Fire
Weather Index (FWI) System daily across five Mediterranean sub-regions (Iberia, southern France, peninsular Italy,
the Balkan Peninsula, and Greece and the Aegean) using a nine-member, bias-corrected EURO-CORDEX regional
climate model ensemble at 0.11 degree resolution, driven under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5, and benchmarked the
ensemble's historical (1991-2020) FWI distribution against ERA5-Land reanalysis and the Global Fire Weather
Database before projecting fire danger to two future periods, 2041-2070 and 2071-2100. A regional empirical
burned-area model, calibrated against 2001-2020 European Forest Fire Information System records using summer
FWI percentiles, antecedent drought code, and land-cover fuel class as predictors, was then applied to the same
ensemble to translate fire weather change into burned-area change. Averaged across the five sub-regions, the
number of very-high-to-extreme fire danger days per year is projected to increase from a historical baseline of 21
days to 34 days (62% increase) under SSP2-4.5 and to 49 days (133% increase) under SSP5-8.5 by 2071-2100,
with the largest absolute increases in Iberia and the Balkans and the largest proportional increases in currently
cooler, wetter sub-regions such as the northern Balkans, where fire danger is projected to more than double.
Modelled burned area rose accordingly, with the ensemble median projecting a 78% increase in annual burned area
across the domain under SSP5-8.5 by end-century relative to 2001-2020, though the inter-model range spanned a
factor of three, reflecting substantial disagreement in projected summer precipitation. Fuel moisture code
components indicated that late-summer drought code values are projected to exceed historical 95th-percentile
thresholds in most years by mid-century under SSP5-8.5, implying a shift toward chronic rather than episodic
extreme fire danger. These results support prioritizing fuel management and suppression capacity expansion in
currently lower-risk sub-regions where relative fire danger change, not absolute danger level, is projected to be
largest.
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