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Fire ignored in climate change modelling

29 April 2009

Satellite images of smoke plumes from fires in southeast Australia on 11 January 2007. Red outlines indicate active fires.

A Monash researcher is one of 22 scientists from around the world to make recommendations for future climate change analysis to include fire.

Deputy Head of School of Geography and Environmental Science Associate Professor Christian Kull and his colleagues have made a number of recommendations and assessments of carbon emissions in an article published in Science.

"We have called on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to fully-integrate fire into their assessments of global climate change, and consider fire-climate feedbacks, which have been largely absent in global models," Associate Professor Kull said.

The authors claim that intentional deforestation fires alone contribute to up to one-fifth of the manmade increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

Associate Professor Kull said the report focused on the fact that the earth was an intrinsically flammable planet due to its cover of carbon-rich vegetation, seasonally dry climates, atmospheric oxygen, widespread lightning, and volcano ignitions.

"Yet despite our long-held appreciation of this flammability, the global scope of fire has been revealed only recently by satellite observations," Associate Professor Kull said.

"These satellite images highlight that fire is long-overdue to be incorporated in all assessments of climate change and factored in on modeling and predictions."

The article pulls together knowledge about fire, which has until now, remained separated in various fields and departments of universities across the globe.