Question: How does climate change affect wildfires?

Thomas Smith answered on 16 Jun 2014:

Climate change will lead to increases in temperature (increasing the likelihood of wildfires) and changes in rainfall, increasing in some places (decreasing likelihood of wildfires), but decreasing in others (increasing the likelihood of wildfires).

Trying to predict which places will see more wildfires and which will see less is a difficult job. In the UK, we think wildfires are more likely to happen with climate change. In the future we might have warmer and wetter winters, this will lead to more vegetation growing through the winter and into spring (providing more fuel for fires in the summer). In the summer we are likely to see warmer dryer weather. This combination of more fuel and hotter dryer summers is not good, and it’s likely we’ll see more fires in our forests and moors.