New study makes alarming prediction about disaster risk in major cities: 'Potential strategies could be directly applied'

Climate change will likely cause city fires to become more common throughout this century, a new study found.

What's happening?

The study, published in Nature Cities and posted on Phys.org, was led by researchers Long Shi and Heping Zhang from the University of Science and Technology of China.

"Anthropogenic warming is known to have influenced vegetation fires," study authors wrote. "However, how, or to what extent, a warming climate will impact urban fire frequency remains unknown."

The research team analyzed urban fire data from more than 2,800 cities across 20 countries, monitoring the changes that occurred with building fires, vehicle fires, and outdoor fires, such as those that occur at landfills. They then modeled what that data would look like under various climate change scenarios.

They found that with each degree Celsius that the air temperature increased, outdoor fires increased by 4.7% and vehicle fires increased by 2.5%. 

In a model with high heat-trapping pollution, the findings were even more drastic. By the year 2100, researchers predicted that outdoor fires could increase by 22.2% and vehicle fires could increase by 11.6%. According to the study, Shi and colleagues "also report an estimated total of 335,000 fire-related deaths and 1.1 million fire-related injuries between 2020 and 2100, attributable to global warming, across all cities in this study."

Why is this study important?

Urban fires are just the latest risk linked to the climate crisis.

Wildfires have already increased in frequency and severity, and many studies have found that they will likely continue to do so. Earlier this year, large swaths of Southern California were destroyed by fire, and experts found that the fires were more likely and more intense because of climate change.

Last year was the hottest on record, and with a warming planet comes more extreme weather. It's not limited to fires. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and more are all more likely to occur as the planet becomes hotter. This is why the climate crisis has been referred to as "steroids for weather."

What's being done about fires?

Further research on urban fires is necessary, as researchers noted. The study did not include any data from Africa or South America, and the vehicle fire numbers did not account for the changing automotive landscape — most notably, a shift to more electric vehicles.

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But the study made it clear that wildfires aren't the only fire-related concern attributable to global warming and that urban fires will also need to be a focus in the future.

"By implementing regional, timely, and precise firefighting resource planning, potential strategies could be directly applied to reduce fire-related casualties and property losses," a USTC release said.

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