PyroFutures (Wildland)
Wildland Fire Trajectories to 2100
Wildfires, emblematic of Earth's dynamic ecosystems, are both agents and indicators of environmental change. PyroFutures: Wildland Fire Trajectories (2018) explores the complex interplay between wildfire regimes and global climatic shifts. In an era of intensifying climatic uncertainty, forecasting wildfire behaviour becomes a critical endeavour, with implications for ecological resilience, land management, and human safety. Drawing upon the palaeological record and contemporary modelling, this thesis chapter investigates how historical fire patterns and evolutionary responses inform our understanding of potential future scenarios.
The interdependence of climate, vegetation, and ignition patterns underscores wildfire’s role as a synecological unit, responsive to local and global changes. Highlighting phenomena such as the reconfiguration of ecological communities and the feedback loops linking wildfires to climate systems, the chapter examines the adaptability of species and ecosystems amidst environmental pressures. From boreal forests to Mediterranean shrublands, and from drought-induced die-offs to the escalating frequency of extreme fire events, it addresses the pressing need for a paradigm shift in Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) planning.
By synthesising historical data, theoretical frameworks, and emerging research, PyroFutures offers a lens through which to anticipate the cascading effects of wildfires in a warming world, advocating adaptive strategies to navigate this formidable environmental challenge.
Extract
“Uncertain though Earth’s climatological future may be (Stern, 2006), humanity nonetheless has the capacity to anticipate how and why shifts in land, sea, and air temperatures may impact upon planetary systems. As discussed earlier, the palaeological record illuminates how “biogeochemical cycles” (Schneider, 1997), and the abiotic and biotic components thereof, have historically responded to climatic shifts. Contrary to the views of some conservationists, whereupon species were to remain in states of dispersal and population stasis [i.e. within set geographical ranges] their extinction would be not prevented, but accelerated. Several dozen paleobiological studies have made evident that at the scales of temperature change as both theoretical and computer modelling assert may occur in the near-term future, though, as Darwin anticipated (2008), floral and faunal species will shift their geographical ranges, they will do so not uniformly (Levin, 1999; Schneider, 1997; Botkin 1992, 2012): a species need not be on an anthropogenically defined ‘guest list’ to ‘get in’ to an ecosystem. Instead, ecological communities, which are “loosely defined assemblages of role players”, which within fire regimes include evaders, resistors, and endurers, will reconfigure in space and time not as superorganisms “with a common purpose and destiny” (Levin, 1999, p.33), but as individual species of which the physiological and behavioural capacity, symbiotic and otherwise, for climatic and wider environmental adaption varies from one unto another. Therein lies a truth in Gaia Theory [as distinct from the earlier Gaia hypothesis] in that, in the generic sense of the term, “life” is “tightly coupled with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks” (Lovelock, 2016, p.xviii): life is beholden unto the biochemical constraints with which it coevolves (Ward, 2009).
From one geological epoch to another, trees have “moved, but old forests disappeared” (Schneider, 1997, p.94). Given the now innumerable ways in which humanity obstructs floral and faunal movements, be it building border walls, monocultures, shipping lanes, railways, flight paths, or levels of noise and/or light pollution so great as to undermine animal navigation sensory capacities, none are they as can accurately predict the extent to which non-human life will endure any such environmental changes as lay ahead. But, that several of the plant genera that have been discussed in this thesis, such as the conifer and the oak, have not merely survived, but thrived throughout climatic conditions both within and beyond the range as may manifest in the years, decades, and centuries, ahead, is without question. The matter thereof is both supported by the findings as have already been discussed [i.e. climatological, geological, and dendrological records], and by the physiologies of the flora, or more specifically their leaves, which preserved as fossils reveal the atmospheric carbon dioxide level to which they were adapted through “the number of microscopic pores” on their surface (Beerling, 2017, p.29).
In 2006, the Stern Review concluded that earlier speculations of future climate “were too optimistic”, stating “more recent evidence indicates that temperature changes resulting from BAU [business as usual] trends in emissions may exceed [a global mean surface temperature of] 2-3°C by the end of this century”, but that 5-6°C warming “is a real possibility” (Stern, p.ix). The IPCC’s 2013 assessment report predicted a marginally more conservative range of 1-3.7°C by the latter two decades of the century (Stocker et al, 2013). Should the lower of Stern’s estimates come to pass, mean surface temperatures would mirror those of the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period (McGuire, 2013), when Tundra and Taiga forests populated polar regions that are presently snow-capped, mid-high latitudes were 10-20°C warmer than today, of which the overall conclusion from “all model simulations” is that of “a generally warmer and wetter climate” (Salzmann et al, 2009, online). Given, “vegetation has greened across a third of the Arctic from 1982-2012” (Liberto, 2017, online); boreal forest wildfires in some regions now exceed the “fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years” (Kelly et al, 2013); and now numerous, microbes, mammals, and more faunal and floral species are re-populating polar regions and/or becoming more regionally productive, as each modifies the fast-changing territory as best befits their needs (Fountain, 2017; Dengler, R, 2017), we need no longer look merely to computer and theoretical models [Fig. 41], and the palaeological record to anticipate the near- medium term climate future.”
Read ‘PyroFutures: Wildland Fire Trajectories’, in ‘Panarchistic Architecture’ in full here.
Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.