PyroFutures 2025 (Wildland)
Framing the future of wildfires now
Wildfire activity worldwide since 2018
The first of two parts, Pyrofutures 2025 [wildlands] discusses the evolving dynamics of wildfire activity worldwide since the publication of Panarchistic Architecture in 2018, laying bare the interconnected ecological, meteorological, and anthropogenic drivers reshaping fire regimes. The essay examines how rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and human encroachments into fire-prone areas converge to create a "perfect firestorm," exacerbating tree mortality and escalating carbon emissions.
Underscoring the importance of integrating diverse datasets and historical perspectives to untangle wildfire's complexities, the discussion integrates critique of oversimplified media narratives, advocating for nuanced understanding as we navigate the "Pyrocene" — an epoch defined by escalating fire activity.
From boreal forests to urban interfaces, this piece explores how wildfire intensity and behaviour vary across biomes, exposing both risks and adaptive capacities within Earth's ecosystems.
By illuminating the challenges of wildfires' dual role as a natural ecological process and a destructive force, the essay calls for informed, systemic responses. As extreme fires increasingly threaten communities and ecosystems, Pyrofutures 2025 invites readers to confront the urgent policy and practical challenges posed by humanity’s deepening entanglement with fire.
Extract
“Several years since Panarchistic Architecture was first published, its projections on the near term future of wildfires in the contiguous United States, wider North America, and worldwide have come to pass. As had been anticipated, a confluence of factors culminated in a perfect fire storm propagated by both feedback loops within the Earth’s climate, hydrological, meteorological, and ecological systems, in concert with human activity, both intentional and otherwise. Now as throughout the period in which the data that informed the thesis was aggregated and analysed, the matter that multiple metrics and approaches are used across wildfire science to assess wildfire activity has led to conflicted positions within the wider scientific community, as different conclusions are drawn in response to different data sets. Though press and media reporting on wildfire activity has increased, again, now as then, all too many articles rely on assumptions informed by partial perspectives on this highly complex phenomena. Understanding how wildfire’s behaviour is changing requires analysis of diverse data, and both contemporary and historical. Contextualisation is critical, because wrong assumptions can easily be drawn from short-term trends, and especially whereupon the complexity of fire regimes is not accommodated in analysis. While awareness of fire ecology and wildfire’s role in the ecosystems of the regions to which it is native has increased, mis-information continues to abound, as Clements linear succession overshadows later studies that disproved the validity of the climax community model.
Globally, the causations of wildfire ignition have remained consistent with those of the preceding period, with lightning the primary ignition source in boreal forests (Janssen, T, A, J., et al, 2023), which accounted for 70% of tree loss cover from wildfires between 2001 - 2023, human action, including land clearance for agricultural expansion the primary ignition source in tropical forests (MacCarthy, J., et al, 2024) and in areas within and adjacent to the wildland-urban-interface (NIFC, 2024). Now, as then, the shift in wildfire activity is highly heterogeneous, both in terms of the annual acres burned, and the shifts in wildfire intensity, severity, and behaviour across the different biome types and geographic regions. We continue to see some fire-adapted areas experience less wildfire activity than typical of their historical fire regime, such as in Africa’s grasslands (Jones et al., 2024), while others experience markedly greater activity, be that by frequency, intensity, or both. Nonetheless, data shows that between 2001 and 2023 tree cover loss in boreal forests averaged an increase of roughly 3.6% annually (MacCarthy, J., et al, 2024), and between 2001 - 2019 the overall area burned globally by forest fires increased by around 5.4% per year (Tyukavina, A., et al, 2022). Furthermore, the period was punctuated by several record breaking wildfires across forests and shrublands in the circumpolar region, and in Temperature, and Mediterranean type climate regions. Throughout, annual fire extent and tree mortality remained inconsistent due to factors including seasonal instability in precipitation, temperature, and humidity levels.”
Read ‘PyroFutures 2025 wildlands’ in full here.