Climate change impacts on natural risks in forests: the case of wildfire and its interactions with drought and insect outbreaks

This study reports projections of forest fire danger in Europe under various climate change scenarios, indicating increased frequency, intensity, and a northward expansion of high-risk areas. It critically evaluates large-scale empirical climate-fire danger relations and emphasizes the need to incorporate biophysical processes governing fuel moisture and availability at management scales. The authors discuss how drought stress and insect outbreaks can abruptly alter fuel characteristics, and describe their process-based approaches to model fuel dynamics and fire spread using physics-based fire behavior models. The work highlights interactions between climate, vegetation, and fire to improve predictions of wildfire impacts in Mediterranean and northern European forests.