Climate Change Will Increase Fire Weather Danger In Indian Forests: Study

Human driven activity has caused significant change in earth’s climate in unprecedented ways and this has led to rapid increase in atmospheric temperatures and will continue to rise even further in the future. According to a recent study by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, these warming temperatures will lead to increase in the fire weather danger in many Indian forests.

IIT Delhi researchers developed a very high-resolution data set of future climate projections and used that data to calculate the Fire Weather Index (FWI) for forest regions of India. The results showed that forests in Central and South India and the Himalayan region will see significant increases in FWI by the end of the century. The fire season in these regions will also increase by 12-61 days, as per the report.

These findings from the research aligned well with the conventional wisdom that higher temperatures increase forest fire hazard. Interestingly, the study showed that the effect will not be same in all forests. Humid tropical forests in the Western Ghats and parts of the North-East, where rainfall and humidity are expected to rise, will experience lower FWI despite the warming.

Dr. Somnath Baidya Roy, Professor and Head of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, and a co-author of the study, said, “We must study forest fires in India at a high degree of granularity to properly represent the diversity in climate and forest types across the country. Course resolution global scale studies simply don’t work for us.”

Anasuya Barik, PhD student at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences and the lead author of the study, said, “Our study is the first of its kind in India and has significant implications for understanding and managing forest fires. Our study shows that we need to develop fire danger thresholds and management policies at local levels instead of national levels.”

The study was published in Communications Earth and Environment, a highly ranked journal from the Nature Springer group.