Speaker
Description
Climate change is driving increased fire weather across the world. Hot, dry and windy conditions lead to higher risk of fire ignition and spread and make fire suppression more difficult. With further warming, fire weather is projected to increase in many parts of the world. This means today’s children and young people will be exposed to an ever-greater number of fire danger days during their lifetimes. In this study, we analyze projections of Canadian fire weather index (FWI) conditions over Portugal and Europe from an ensemble of CMIP6 simulations previously bias-adjusted and statistically downscaled against ERA5-Land (Hetzer et al. 2024). We define fire danger days as days exceeding the 95th percentile of FWI values in a grid cell from a reference period (1985-2014) in historical simulations. Combining this with spatially explicit demographic data, we apply a lifetime exposure framework (Thiery et al. 2021), now adapted as a flexible python package dem4cli, to estimate the number of fire danger days that people of different generations are projected to be exposed to during their lifetimes under stylized warming pathways ranging from below 1.5ºC to 3.5ºC of warming in 2100. We find young people in Portugal and Europe will be disproportionately exposed to fire danger days compared to older generations during their lifetimes, and that they have the most to gain from ambitious mitigation. Our research highlights the intergenerational inequity of climate change impacts, underlining the urgency of ambitious mitigation and adaptation action.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | Yes |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
