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A global assessment of the carbon cycle and temperature responses to major changes in future fire regime

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Abstract

Changes in the current fire regime would directly affect carbon cycling, land–atmosphere exchanges, and atmospheric composition, and could therefore modulate the ongoing climate warming. We used a coupled climate–carbon model to quantify the effect of major changes in non-deforestation fires on the global carbon cycle and temperature, from 2015 to 2300. When considering only CO2 fire emissions, the impacts from changes in fire frequency were limited for the global carbon cycle, and almost negligible for the global atmospheric surface temperature. The net fire emissions were only a fraction of the CO2 directly emitted during combustion due to vegetation regrowth and climate–CO2 feedbacks, and the albedo increases caused by changes in vegetation cover countered the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on global temperature. When employing a simplified approach based on global-mean radiative forcings in order to estimate the impact of non-CO2 fire emissions, the effect of increased fire frequency on global temperature depended critically on the uncertain net aerosol forcing. Despite this major uncertainty, our results overall do not support the hypothesis of a strong positive climate–fire feedback for the coming centuries.

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Acknowledgments

We thank M. Eby for providing us with forcing input files, D. Plouffe for helping us create the burned area input file, and J.-F. Rajotte for comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We also thank the five reviewers and the Deputy Editor for their helpful suggestions. Funding was provided by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (J.-S.L.).

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  1. Navin Ramankutty

    Present address: Liu Institute for Global Issues and Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

    Jean-Sébastien Landry & Navin Ramankutty

  2. Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

    H. Damon Matthews

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  1. Jean-Sébastien Landry
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Correspondence to Jean-Sébastien Landry.

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Landry, JS., Matthews, H.D. & Ramankutty, N. A global assessment of the carbon cycle and temperature responses to major changes in future fire regime. Climatic Change 133, 179–192 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1461-8

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