Analysis of global forest fires

Hotspots and burned areas in forest ecosystems

Aurélie Shapiro, Reinhard Kückes WWF Germany

January 3, 2021

view this Story Map in German

In 2020, whilst most of us were kept on edge by the COVID-19 pandemic, an environmental crisis was silently unfolding in our forests.

The WWF report published in April 2020, revealed that in almost every type of forest ecosystem, the number and severity of fires had increased by 13% compared to 2019.

2019 was already a record year for fires worldwide.

There are a number of cumulative factors: persistently hotter and drier weather due to climate change , land conversion for agriculture , and poor forest management. New studies have shown that since 2019, the health crisis has also contributed to the outbreak of large-scale forest fires in multiple countries.

This story map presents the topic of forest fires, as well as providing geo-spatial tools to access the data for your own analysis.

Global Annual Burned Forest Area - more recent years in red, older burned area in yellow. Source: MODIS data

Fires and the Natural Cycle

Natural post-fire vegetation regrowth — Post-fire vegetation regrowth (© Jorge BARTOLOME / WWF)

In some regions of the planet, natural fires are a vital part of the ecosystem's annual cycle. Plants and animals have co-evolved with periodically occurring fires, usually triggered by lightning strikes. Some species such as sequoias in the US, eucalyptus in Australia, and pines in southern Europe even rely on regular fires to trigger seed release and regeneration. The burning of light ground cover creates fertile ash and reduces the overall fuel load, preventing more serious, destructive fires. For these reasons, controlled fires are started by park rangers or forest managers.

The Human Factor

Humans also cause many unintentional fires (e.g. burning rubbish and debris, industrial accidents, etc.). Increasingly, human-caused climate change heightens the risk of forest fires, as many regions are becoming hotter and drier.

Consequences

Biodiversity

Unexpected, or atypical forest fires cause long-term destruction of valuable biodiversity-rich ecosystems, some of which will never be able to recover.

Borneo’s critically endangered orang-utans, whose numbers have fallen by 60% since 1950, have been adversely affected by fires consuming their habitat and food supplies, for example.

Human Health and Wellbeing

Large fires can affect the health of local populations. Inhalating the smoke and particles attacks the respiratory system, and makes affected people prone to lung infections like Covid-19 .

Economic damages

Entire economies can be affected by the short-term displacement of residents, disruption of trade and the destruction of property and infrastructure.

In 2017, around 550,000 people worldwide had to be evacuated because of wildfires. It can be a major logistical and economic challenge to meet the basic survival needs of those affected.

Carbon emissions

Fires release carbon stored in vegetation and soils into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. This gas is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect and climate change - which in turn increases drought and higher temperatures, creating a vicious cycle.

Call for Action

For these reasons, urgent action is needed on a global level. Policy-makers have to address the root causes of forest fires, rather than struggle with the consequences. The private sector can make a difference by insisting on deforestation and conversion-free supply chains.

On an individual level we can also take action and responsibility: citizens must be more careful not to accidentally start forest fires, we should also check on our government's actions, and the impact of the products we consume.

WWF is actively taking part in prevention of deforestation and atypical forest fires, for example in Portugal and Indonesia .

This is in line with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) number 15, which aims to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”.

Observations from Space

To grasp the scale of forest fires worldwide, we rely on standardized data that is available for the entire planet. The MODIS sensors onboard the two USGS satellites, Terra and Aqua, are providing us with daily images of the Earth from space, including data on fires in forests, as well as other ecosystems.

This GLOBIL dashboard annual continental burned area by country, WWF landscape and protected area

Emerging Hotspots

The Emerging Hotspots Analysis identifies the locations of statistically significant forest fires in space and time. The resulting information can be used to pinpoint areas in which fires have increased in recent years, showing where urgent action is needed most.

Emerging Forest Fire Hotspots - click the button in the lower left to activate the legend

Methodology

For our analysis we used data from the MODIS MCD64A1 Burned Area product which is a monthly, global gridded 500 meter product, providing data from 2002. Fires and burned areas are detected with an automated algorithm based on a vegetation index and a thermal heat-detecting band. We filtered only those burned areas that fell within a dataset of global forest cover from the year 2000, to make sure we are looking at forest fires, and then assessed the burned area by year.

We calculated the yearly burned area for five different region types, namely: two administrative levels (countries and provinces), ecoregions (as defined by The Nature Conservancy ), WWF Priority 35 Ecoregions , and protected areas organized by country and IUCN category (published by Protected Planet ).

In another step we used separate data from the VIIRS sensor onboard the Suomi NPP satellite (only available from 2011 onwards) and applied the Emerging Hot Spot Analysis within ArcGIS, calculating time-space relationships to find areas with increasing and decreasing fire trends. The identification of these areas can be used to effectively concentrate resources on areas close to these hotspots that are likely prone to fires in the near future.

Data Access

Here you can access the data through our portal:

Data portal on global forest fires