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Fire has always been one of the more dramatic routes by which humanity and the plant kingdom interact. Forest management practices, urban planning and global warming are conspiring to make the relationship ever more destructive.

The destructive consequences of catastrophic wildfires, which are capable of destroying homes and livelihoods, frequently hit the front pages of newspapers worldwide. But scientific attention is increasingly turning towards understanding changes in wildfire regimes.

The impacts of climate change were again increasingly apparent and the future was emphasized in the IPCC Special Report, yet political change is still lagging.

Akshat Chulawat describes how graph theory can be used to predict the vulnerability of the built environment to wildfire.

Following a catastrophic wildfire, iconic coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) trees rebuilt their canopies by leveraging massive, stored carbon reserves, some of which were photosynthesized from the atmosphere 50–100 years ago. New leaves grew from buried buds, which had been dormant for 500–1,000 plus years in the oldest trees.

Rising temperatures are set to take over from direct human activity as the main spark of global wildfires.

Increased temperatures could bring large blazes every year from the middle of this century.

The 2017 wildfire season has seen unusually high fire levels in many parts of the world, with extensive and severe fires occurring in Chile, the Mediterranean, Russia, the US, Canada and even Greenland. Is this a sign of things to come?

COVID-19 lockdowns stalled protected area management in many countries. New research examines how fire and on-site protected area management are interlinked, demonstrating the novel use of satellite data and statistical modelling.

Without better forest management, country can expect further uncontrolled fires in the future.

Where there is smoke, there are radiative feedbacks. With wildfires becoming a growing problem in the Anthropocene, we need to better understand the influence of fire on the climate system.

Increasing fire frequency and severity may shift boreal forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources and amplify climate warming. Analysis indicates that fuel characteristics are important drivers of wildfire carbon emissions across a broad range of North America’s boreal forest.

Thawing Arctic permafrost, and release of its stored carbon, is a known amplifier of global warming. Now research suggests an increase in Arctic lightning could speed up the permafrost’s demise.

Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire management strategies today.

The bushfires burning in Australia have led to widespread local and global calls for increased efforts to mitigate climate change.

Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, but they can become destructive and less predictable, especially when the system is perturbed. Human activities and climate change lead to interactions with fire dynamics that need our attention.

Fire weather indices are unsuited to forecast fire in tropical rainforests. Now research shows the area burnt across Borneo is related to drought-depleted water tables, presenting the opportunity to predict fire danger in these environments.

Cumulative wildfires or prescribed burning produce different outcomes for the vegetation, suggest two long-term analyses of fire-affected ecosystems. Climate change and land management practices are altering how ecosystems function.

The extinction of megafauna in Australia roughly coincided with shifts in vegetation and fire regimes. Sediment geochemistry shows that the vegetation shift followed the extinction, indicating that the loss of browsers promoted fire and altered plant composition.

Boreal forest fires tend to be more intense and lethal in North America than Eurasia. Differences in tree species composition explain these differences in fire regime, and lead to contrasting feedbacks to climate.

To improve climate resilience for extreme fire events, researchers need to translate modelling uncertainties into useful guidance and be wary of overconfidence. If Earth system models do not capture the severity of recent Australian wildfires, development is urgently needed to assess whether we are underestimating fire risk.

Vegetation-type conversions driven by fire and climate change in the western United States forests are altering landscapes.

As temperatures soar, forests blaze and houses burn, the media and public may be forced to face up to the reality of a changing climate, says Max A. Moritz.

The recent fires in southern Australia were unprecedented in scale and severity. Much commentary has rightly focused on the role of climate change in exacerbating the risk of fire. Here, we contend that policy makers must recognize that historical and contemporary logging of forests has had profound effects on these fires’ severity and frequency.

Globally, flora, fauna and many indigenous cultures have evolved to coexist sustainably with fire. We argue that the key to sustainable contemporary human coexistence with wildfires is a form of biomimicry that draws on the evolutionary adaptations of organisms that survive (and flourish) in the fire regimes in which they reside.

Forests in the American west are under attack from giant fires, climate change and insect outbreaks. Some ecosystems will never be the same.

Climate change and unsustainable land-use practices are causing megafires in South America. Here we call for rigorous scientific coordination and global cooperation to claim back landscape planning, mitigate fire risk and foster resilience in the region.