By Rebekah Heath On the tails of the destructive California wildfires of this year, the 2017 Conference on Fire Prediction Across Scales is scheduled to take place October 23-25 at Columbia University. Globally, fires play an important role in climate change, as they emit both aerosols and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at accelerated rates. […]
A new paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that rising temperatures have increased the risk of fires even during non-drought years in Indonesia, possibly making mild fire seasons in the country a thing of the past. The study was conducted by scientists at IRI, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Temple University and the Center for International […]
The IRI has developed a forecast maproom that characterizes the expected fire activity in the Amazon based on climate conditions for the upcoming dry season. Kátia Fernandes, along with Walter Baethgen and Lisa Goddard, have been researching how the Amazon fires are influenced by large-scale ocean phenomena and how sea surface temperature (SST) forecasts can […]
Indonesia on track for worst fire season since 1997 This post contains excerpts from a story published by IRI on Medium.com. View the full story, including data and additional graphics, here. Written by staff from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Media can contact Francesco Fiondella. Much of western Indonesia is […]
By Samuel McGlennon This post is an excerpt of a piece on the website for the Center for International Forestry Research. View the full article here. In 2010, catastrophic fires ravaged huge tracts of the western Amazon, a region of rainforest that until just a few years earlier was considered beyond the reach of serious drought. Those […]
This article is a modification from the original press release issued by The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences A new study suggests the southern portion of the Amazon rainforest is at a much higher risk of dieback due to climate change than projections made in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel […]
For millennia, people have set fires to clear land for cultivation, pastures or hunting; so-called slash-and-burn agriculture is still common across much of tropical Africa, Asia and South America. It has been a useful strategy, but it is now becoming problematic. A new Earth Institute story and documentary, shot in the Peruvian Amazon, follows the […]
Imagine smoke and haze so thick it causes ships to crash into each other, shuts down airports and sends millions of people to the hospital with respiratory problems. This was the scene in Southeast Asia in 1997 and 1998, when land-clearing fires set by massive palm oil plantations and small scale farmers burned out of […]