Fire risk and sustainable development

Integrating agentic AI within a shared governance framework for wildfire management would help overcome cooperation problems and improve collaboration and coordination in decision-making across agencies, suggests a synthesis of inefficiencies and options for improvement.

Fire-conditioned degradation now rivals deforestation as an independent source of carbon loss across Amazonia. This Comment argues that fire and degradation are first-order risks to Nature-based solutions and must be embedded explicitly in monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), as well as crediting and jurisdictional finance.

The 2025 Los Angeles fires exposed the escalating threat of urban fires and their potential to trigger major human disasters. This Comment outlines key policy strategies to strengthen fire resilience and reframe urban fires as both a climate risk and a national security concern.

Labile particulate organic carbon is more vulnerable to wildfire loss than mineral-associated organic carbon, with soil carbon losses intensifying over the first two decades after fire and totalling about 886 Tg globally during 1997–2023, based on a global meta-analysis of 210 studies.

Fire occurrences are a major driver of severe, seasonally intense nitrogen dioxide pollution in West Africa, necessitating urgent policy interventions to mitigate the significant risks to human health, according to remote sensing data.

Global forest loss continues with no evidence of reduction by certification or protection. Non-fire forest loss was positively associated with industrial roundwood and fuelwood production, and negatively associated with GDP per capita (2013–2023)

This study develops the Pyro-Socio-Ecological Zone (PSEZ) framework, an approach that integrates ecological, socioeconomic, and governance dimensions to define the Wildland-Urban Interface and support wildfire management strategies internationally.