Climate and Atmospheric Science (ICAS) PhD Projects
African wildfire and climate change
Supervisors: Dr Dominick Spracklen & Dr Steve Arnold
Wildfires are a global phenomena occurring on every continent except Antarctica through complex interactions between weather, climate, vegetation and humans. Wildfire has substantial economic costs. During 1997-1998 fires caused economic costs of $US 10-15 billion across Latin America and $US 8.8-9.3 billion in South-East Asia including $US 1 billion due to the adverse health effects of smoke haze. Over the past few decades there has been an increase in the occurrence of large, uncontrollable fires potentially driven by changes to climate. Future climate change may cause further changes to the amount and severity of wildfire and limit our ability to manage and control the impact of fire.
Africa is the continent of wildfire, accounting for 70% of the global total area burned by wildfire each year. The occurrence of fire in Africa is controlled largely by climate, in particular rainfall which controls both the availability and flammability of fuel. Whilst fire is a natural and important component of African ecosystems, humans have now modified the natural fire cycle using fire to clear land for agriculture and suppressing fire when it threatens infrastructure or crops. African fire also has important negative impacts on human livelihoods: in 2008 45 people were killed and nearly 200 homes destroyed by wildfire in Mozambique and South Africa. The impacts of African fire on air quality have not been well studied. Future changes to climate and to human activity (for example, substantial projected population growth) are likely to cause large changes to fire across Africa. Despite such importance the impact of climate change on African wildfire has been virtually ignored by the research community: a recent review of wildfire-climate interactions found no studies that focused on Africa.
In this project you will focus on understanding wildfire across Africa and how this is likely to change over the next 50 years through changes in climate and human activity. You will explore both human and climate drivers of wildfire using both empirical and process based models of fire evaluated against satellite remote sensed datasets of wildfire. Projections of future climate from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) will then be used to develop scenarios for future wildfire across Africa. You will use global atmospheric models that have been developed in Leeds to predict the impact of present day and future fire on air quality and human livelihoods across Africa.
This project will contribute to our understanding of present day wildfire across Africa, the impacts of fire on human livelihoods and make projections of how fire will change under climate change scenarios.