Climate change will affect fire weather danger in forests: IIT Delhi

New Delhi : IIT Delhi on Monday said that the human activity is causing the earth’s climate to change in unprecedented ways. The IIT Delhi said that their recent study disclosed that the atmospheric temperatures are rising rapidly and will continue to rise in the future.

“These warming temperatures will increase the fire weather danger in many Indian forests,” the institution said. The IIT Delhi officials said that the researchers developed a very high-resolution data set of future climate projections and used that data to calculate the Fire Weather Index (FWI) for forest regions of India.

“The results showed that forests in Central and South India and the Himalayan region will see significant increases in FWI by the end of the century,” the officials said. They said that the fire season in these regions will also increase by 12-61 days.

“These findings align well with the conventional wisdom that higher temperatures increase forest fire hazard. Interestingly, the study showed that not to be the case in all forests,” the officials said.

They said that humid tropical forests in the Western Ghats and parts of the North-East, where rainfall and humidity are projected to rise, will experience lower FWI despite the warming.

Somnath Baidya Roy, Professor and Head of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, and a co-author of the study said that we must study forest fires in India at a high degree of granularity to properly represent the diversity in climate and forest types across the country.

“Course resolution global scale studies simply don’t work for us,” he said.

Anasuya Barik, PhD student at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences and the lead author of the study said that this study is the first of its kind in India and has significant implications for understanding and managing forest fires.

“Our study shows that we need to develop fire danger thresholds and management policies at local levels instead of national levels,” Barik said.

The IIT said that the study was published in Communications Earth and Environment, a highly ranked journal from the Nature Springer group and is available online.