Road fragment edges enhance wildfire incidence and intensity, while suppressing global burned area.

Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables.

Global rise in forest fire emissions linked to climate change in the extratropics.

Climate change increases fire-favorable weather in forests, but fire trends are also affected by multiple other controlling factors that are difficult to untangle. We use machine learning to systematically group forest ecoregions into 12 global forest pyromes, with each showing distinct sensitivities to climatic, human, and vegetation controls. This delineation revealed that rapidly increasing forest fire emissions in extratropical pyromes, linked to climate change, offset declining emissions in tropical pyromes during 2001 to 2023.

Impacts of ground-level ozone on sugarcane production.

Sugarcane is a vital commodity crop often grown in (sub)tropical regions which have been experiencing a recent deterioration in air quality. Unlike for other commodity crops, the risk of air pollution, specifically ozone (O), to this C crop has not yet been quantified. Yet, recent work has highlighted both the potential risks of O to C bioenergy crops, and the emergence of O exposure across the tropics as a vital factor determining global food security.

The carbon sink of secondary and degraded humid tropical forests.

The globally important carbon sink of intact, old-growth tropical humid forests is declining because of climate change, deforestation and degradation from fire and logging. Recovering tropical secondary and degraded forests now cover about 10% of the tropical forest area, but how much carbon they accumulate remains uncertain. Here we quantify the aboveground carbon (AGC) sink of recovering forests across three main continuous tropical humid regions: the Amazon, Borneo and Central Africa.

On the use of Earth Observation to support estimates of national greenhouse gas emissions and sinks for the Global stocktake process: lessons learned from ESA-CCI RECCAP2.

The Global Stocktake (GST), implemented by the Paris Agreement, requires rapid developments in the capabilities to quantify annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals consistently from the global to the national scale and improvements to national GHG inventories. In particular, new capabilities are needed for accurate attribution of sources and sinks and their trends to natural and anthropogenic processes. On the one hand, this is still a major challenge as national GHG inventories follow globally harmonized methodologies based on the guidelines established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but these can be implemented differently for individual countries.

Large carbon sink potential of secondary forests in the Brazilian Amazon to mitigate climate change.

Tropical secondary forests sequester carbon up to 20 times faster than old-growth forests. This rate does not capture spatial regrowth patterns due to environmental and disturbance drivers. Here we quantify the influence of such drivers on the rate and spatial patterns of regrowth in the Brazilian Amazon using satellite data.

Author Correction: Benchmark maps of 33 years of secondary forest age for Brazil.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Benchmark maps of 33 years of secondary forest age for Brazil.

The restoration and reforestation of 12 million hectares of forests by 2030 are amongst the leading mitigation strategies for reducing carbon emissions within the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contribution targets assumed under the Paris Agreement. Understanding the dynamics of forest cover, which steeply decreased between 1985 and 2018 throughout Brazil, is essential for estimating the global carbon balance and quantifying the provision of ecosystem services. To know the long-term increment, extent, and age of secondary forests is crucial; however, these variables are yet poorly quantified.

Effects of climate and land-use change scenarios on fire probability during the 21st century in the Brazilian Amazon.

The joint and relative effects of future land-use and climate change on fire occurrence in the Amazon, as well its seasonal variation, are still poorly understood, despite its recognized importance. Using the maximum entropy method (MaxEnt), we combined regional land-use projections and climatic data from the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble to investigate the monthly probability of fire occurrence in the mid (2041-2070) and late (2071-2100) 21st century in the Brazilian Amazon. We found striking spatial variation in the fire relative probability (FRP) change along the months, with October showing the highest overall change.

21st Century drought-related fires counteract the decline of Amazon deforestation carbon emissions.

Tropical carbon emissions are largely derived from direct forest clearing processes. Yet, emissions from drought-induced forest fires are, usually, not included in national-level carbon emission inventories. Here we examine Brazilian Amazon drought impacts on fire incidence and associated forest fire carbon emissions over the period 2003-2015.