In temperate Europe, fire is already here: The case of The Netherlands.

Landscape fires are usually not associated with temperate Europe, yet not all temperate countries record statistics indicating that actual risks remain unknown. Here we introduce new wildfire statistics for The Netherlands, and summarize significant events and fatalities. The period 2017-2022 saw 611 wildfires and 405 ha burned per year, which Copernicus' European Forest Fire Information System satellite data vastly underestimate. Fires burned more heathland than forest, were small (mean fire size 1.5 ha), were caused by people, and often burned simultaneously, in Spring and in Summer drought. Suppression, restoration and traffic delays cost 3 M€ year-1. Dozens of significant events illustrate fire has never been away and has major societal impact amidst grave concerns for firefighter safety. Since 1833, 31 fatalities were reported. A legal framework is needed to ensure continuity of recordkeeping, as the core foundation of integrated fire management, to create a baseline for climate change, and to fulfill international reporting requirements.

New land-use-change emissions indicate a declining CO2 airborne fraction.

About half of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions remain in the atmosphere and half are taken up by the land and ocean1. If the carbon uptake by land and ocean sinks becomes less efficient, for example, owing to warming oceans2 or thawing permafrost3, a larger fraction of anthropogenic emissions will remain in the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. Changes in the efficiency of the carbon sinks can be estimated indirectly by analysing trends in the airborne fraction, that is, the ratio between the atmospheric growth rate and anthropogenic emissions of CO2 (refs. 4-10). However, current studies yield conflicting results about trends in the airborne fraction, with emissions related to land use and land cover change (LULCC) contributing the largest source of uncertainty7,11,12. Here we construct a LULCC emissions dataset using visibility data in key deforestation zones. These visibility observations are a proxy for fire emissions13,14, which are - in turn - related to LULCC15,16. Although indirect, this provides a long-term consistent dataset of LULCC emissions, showing that tropical deforestation emissions increased substantially (0.16 Pg C decade-1) since the start of CO2 concentration measurements in 1958. So far, these emissions were thought to be relatively stable, leading to an increasing airborne fraction4,5. Our results, however, indicate that the CO2 airborne fraction has decreased by 0.014 ± 0.010 decade-1 since 1959. This suggests that the combined land-ocean sink has been able to grow at least as fast as anthropogenic emissions.

Fire and deforestation dynamics in Amazonia (1973-2014).

Consistent long-term estimates of fire emissions are important to understand the changing role of fire in the global carbon cycle and to assess the relative importance of humans and climate in shaping fire regimes. However, there is limited information on fire emissions from before the satellite era. We show that in the Amazon region, including the Arc of Deforestation and Bolivia, visibility observations derived from weather stations could explain 61% of the variability in satellite-based estimates of bottom-up fire emissions since 1997 and 42% of the variability in satellite-based estimates of total column carbon monoxide concentrations since 2001. This enabled us to reconstruct the fire history of this region since 1973 when visibility information became available. Our estimates indicate that until 1987 relatively few fires occurred in this region and that fire emissions increased rapidly over the 1990s. We found that this pattern agreed reasonably well with forest loss data sets, indicating that although natural fires may occur here, deforestation and degradation were the main cause of fires. Compared to fire emissions estimates based on Food and Agricultural Organization's Global Forest and Resources Assessment data, our estimates were substantially lower up to the 1990s, after which they were more in line. These visibility-based fire emissions data set can help constrain dynamic global vegetation models and atmospheric models with a better representation of the complex fire regime in this region.