Future wildfire risk in Southern Europe under changing land use, population, and climate: a data-driven approach

Abstract

Wildfires are one of the most devastating natural disasters with wide impacts across economic sectors and society in Europe. It is, however, unclear how wildfire risk will evolve in the future under different climate scenarios, as it depends on future climate change scenarios as well as on land use and population changes. The aim of the study is to study end-of-century wildfire risk in Southern Europe, under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. A data-driven model is trained using historical data and a combination of other data sources representing hydro-meteorological variables, land cover, human activities, and topography. The best-performing model is the XGBoost model with an AUC of 0.93 and F1 score of 0.85. Using SHapley Additive exPlanations values, we identify the most influential predictors. The trained model is run daily using future climate projections from the Canadian Regional Climate Model version 5 under the SSP1–2.6 and SSP3–7.0 scenarios, including explicit changes in population and land cover. Future projections confirm that the wildfire risk will increase by the end of the century (2081–2100) in the SSP3–7.0, with limited changes in the SSP1–2.6 scenario. The results further show that including future land cover and population changes modulates the projected wildfire risk in scenario-dependent ways, highlighting the need to jointly account for climatic and socio-environmental drivers when assessing future wildfire risk.