Recent fire patterns in Italy, consequent carbon loss and greenhouse gas emissions, and implications for land and fire management

Forest fires produce a remarkable amount of greenhouse gas and solid particulate matter affecting atmospheric budgets on local, regional, and global scales. d It is estimated that 38% of the biomass combustion comes from forest fires and the remaining 62% results from fossil fuel combustion. Further, forest fire emissions could approach 50% of total biomass emissions of CO2 and particulates in years of extreme fire activity (e.g. years 2003and 2017). In the context of the Italian National Adaptation Plan to Climate Change (PNAC), several strategies were identified to adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change on wildfire to reduce landscape susceptibility and carbon emissions;. Active forest and fuel management, i.e. prescribed burning, fuel reduction and removal, weed and flammable shrub control, and creation of fuel discontinuity, is an important effort to adapt and mitigate the impact of climate change on wildfire. Unfortunately, however, there is a lack of studies about the effectiveness of fire emission mitigation strategies.

This research aims to analyse the recent fire patterns in Italy, the consequent carbon loss and greenhouse gas emissions, and implication for land and fire management using an integrated approach that combines a fire emission model (FOFEM - First Order Fire Effect Model) with a spatially explicit, comprehensive, and accurate fire, vegetation, and weather dataset for the period 2007-2017. Indeed, fire emission quantification is affected by several errors and uncertainties due to the to the difficulty in characterizing the amount of burned biomass, emission factors associated with each specific chemical species, burned area, and combustion efficiency required by the model. Furthermore, several silvicultural techniques derived from the PNAC were combined to develop several fuel management scenarios and tested to evaluate their potential in mitigating fire emissions.