Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Cross-Chapter-Paper-7 (section)

=== CCP7.3.3 Fire Risks from Climate Change in Tropical Forests ===

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Temperature rise and prolonged droughts increase the danger of fires in drained peatlands and tropical forests in Southeast Asia and the Amazon (da Silva et al., 2018; Pan et al., 2018; Sullivan Martin et al., 2020), resulting in large carbon emissions, which reached 11.3 Tg CO 2 day −1 during September–October 2015 (Huijnen et al., 2016; Yin et al., 2020) and changes in forest composition and biodiversity (Asner et al., 2000; Hoffmann et al., 2003) ( ''high confidence'' ). In many cases, tree mortality due to fire is poorly recorded in the literature, but the available data suggest that fire-induced mortality has increased in recent years (Figure CCP7.2) (Malhi et al., 2014; Brando et al., 2019) ( ''high confidence'' ). While large forest and peat fires used to be associated mainly with El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, there is now evidence that tropical rainforests in Indonesia may experience higher fire danger from increased temperatures even during non-drought years due to high evaporation rates of fragmented forests (Fernandes et al., 2017; McAlpine et al., 2018). The droughts of 2007 and 2010 in the Amazonian region caused 12% and 5% of the southeastern Amazon forests to burn, respectively, as compared with &lt;1% of these forests burning during non-drought years (Brando et al., 2014; da Silva Júnior et al., 2019; Pontes-Lopes et al., 2021). Moreover, degraded forests in Ghana are more vulnerable to fires during droughts (Dwomoh et al., 2019).

Factors other than solely climate also interact in enhancing the danger of tropical forest fires. For instance, the extent of burned area of rainforests in Borneo has shown that subsurface hydrology, (i.e., hydrological drought), interacts with meteorological drought and, hence, fires have become more intense in recent decades following the progressive desiccation of the island over the past century (Taufik et al., 2017). Bornean forest fire risk also increased through the interaction of drought with land use conversion for logging, oil palm and tree plantations, and human settlements (Sloan et al., 2017). Similarly, simulations of future fire risks in the Amazon show that extensive land use change under the RCP 8.5 scenario results in 4- to 28-fold enhanced area of forest burned by fire by 2080–2100, as compared with 1990–2010, whereas in an RCP 4.5 scenario, the area burned would be enhanced by 0.9- to 5.4-fold (Le Page et al., 2017).

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