Fire and its complex relationship with the global carbon cycle. Insights and Initiatives from FLARE working group.

Wildfires' increasing prevalence has become synonymous with human’s planetary impact, raising the urgent question: How are changing fire regimes influencing the Global Carbon Cycle? And how will that affect future carbon emission mitigation targets? Addressing this is one of three critical challenges identified by Fire science Learning AcRoss the Earth System (FLARE). FLARE brought together individuals from across fire-related disciplines, including modelling, remote sensing, observations, data science, biogeochemical, physical and social sciences, policy, media and artists, to create a roadmap for future fire science. This includes:

1. Recognizing fire’s intricate role in the carbon cycle beyond just an emission source. Fire also affects plant species’ evolutionary pathways and ecosystem composition, nutrient cycling, carbon allocation into soils, the biogeochemical composition and sequestration of land, ocean, and ice, over different spatiotemporal scales.
2. Understanding human-fire interactions in the carbon cycle. It is crucial to decipher the complex interplay between human-driven factors shaping fire emissions amid shifting climate, vegetation, and soil dynamics. Effective ways to engage with people affected by fires across various scales, from landscape management to international emission targets, are also paramount for comprehensive mitigation strategies.
3. Anticipatory measures like near-real-time attribution tools to aid decision-making during fire events. Annual reports summarizing major fire events and advancements in understanding fire dynamics could enable timely dissemination to inform mitigation efforts and assess land and Earth System carbon resilience to future changes in fire.

These underscore the necessity of continued transdisciplinary collaboration within the fire science community. This challenge is also bigger than the current community, so training the next generation of fire scientists is vital to ensuring sustained progress in understanding and addressing wildfires' carbon challenge – including supporting and retaining Early Career Researchers in fire sciences. We finish by discussing some initiatives stemming from FLARE that aim to address these recommendations.