High-resolution fire weather projections for effective forest management and restoration across the Mediterranean region

The Mediterranean region has historically been prone to wildfire activity. However, many Mediterranean countries have been particularly impacted in recent years by an increase in fire intensity and fire season length, with hundreds of thousands of hectares burned both north and south of the basin. Larger and more frequent fires are anticipated across the Mediterranean region in the future, a key driver of which is the projected increase in so-called fire weather (the meteorological conditions conducive to fire ignition and spread) associated with a warming world. In view of the loss or degradation of forest areas due to wildfires, and in the context of the ongoing UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), Mediterranean countries are actively engaging in post-fire restoration actions. Developing new insights into the evolution of fire weather across Mediterranean ecosystems is crucial for effective forest management and restoration planning. For the Mediterranean, fire weather projections under climate change have typically been extrapolated from global-scale studies or otherwise focused predominantly on Southern European countries. By contrast, far less attention has been given to countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Here, we generate high-resolution fire weather projections for the entire Mediterranean region, using the latest generation of global climate models. We calculate the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) following a multivariate bias correction and downscaling of the FWIs underpinning meteorological variables (namely, maximum daily temperature, minimum daily relative humidity, mean daily wind speed and daily precipitation). Results show changes in the magnitude of FWI seasonal means, maxima and fire season length in different scenarios and areas of the Mediterranean region where fire danger is projected to increase in the forthcoming decades. We discuss potential implications for future land management and restoration activities, as current preventive and restorative strategies should consider these future scenarios to ensure their success. The high-resolution fire weather projections generated here will help to better target areas of intervention and types of measures to be implemented.