The World Is Burning – Climate Change & Global Fires

Find out more about this event on our website: https://bit.ly/3RWLese Climate change is driving increasing wildfires including megafires worldwide, and the business community has begun to reckon with the impacts. The reinsurance industry has reclassified fires as a primary rather than a secondary peril. AXA XL has a special division focused on science and natural perils including fire, but they acknowledge that current catastrophe models don’t handle fire well. Besides such small, specialised business teams, ecologists, and staff of land use sectors directly impacted by fire, few understand the basics of fire: what exactly is fire, what drives it, who uses it and who tries to control it, and how does this impact on nature and society? The talk will provide an overview focused on these questions, with brief case studies from Mediterranean Europe, Australia, California and the Amazon to illustrate key points. It will conclude by summarising why wildfire is such a wicked problem, characterised by uncertainty, complexity, variability and disagreement over how to manage it. Speaker: Dr Simon Pooley is Lambert Lecturer in Environment at Birkbeck University of London, a bequest lectureship created by Dr Michael Lambert, a Fellow of Birkbeck College. Lambert’s work provided a template for new kinds of collaboration between biologists, ecologists, pharmacologists, even ethnographers and cultural historians, in short, interdisciplinary research. Simon's work focuses on wildfires, bioinvasions, and human-wildlife conflicts and coexistence (in which capacity he serves on IUCN specialist groups). He has published an overview of wildfire in Africa, and is interested in fires in grasslands, savannas and Mediterranean-type ecosystems. All Simon's research informs his teaching on environmental topics in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, where he is Programme Director of the MSc in Environment and Sustainability.