Firefighters combating against wildfire in Muli, southwest China's Sichuan province. Photo via The Beijing News

Wildfire, a natural climate event, could get worse with the rise in frequency and intensity under global warming caused by climate change, scientists warned, after multiple countries including China, South Korea and the US suffer great losses from the unruly flames.

“It has become a common sense that wildfire could become worse under climate change,” Dr. Zhang Xiaoquan, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) China Program, a leading nongovernmental organization that works for global conservation, told People’s Daily Overseas Social Media.

The remarks came amid some public concerns over the possibility of more wildfires as global warming worsens around the world, including in China, which recently saw a deadly wildfire.

South Korea has declared a national emergency in response to its largest wildfire in recent years, which broke out on Apr. 4, claiming at least two lives and leading to the evacuation of thousands. Last November, the US also witnessed destructive wildfires in the state of California, which killed over 90 people and engulfed several residential areas.

“Global warming does merely lead to a rise in average temperature on course for 0.85 degrees Celsius – to some, it does not seem to bother them at all. The greater impact is that it intensifies the world’s climate events and increases their frequency, meaning hot weather gets hotter and cold weather gets colder. It also suggests higher risks of natural disasters,” Zhang explained.

A latest climate change report issued by a research center under the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) reaffirms such observations, noting a further tendency of global warming. It also found that China is at higher risks of more extreme weather and climate events.

The nation has witnessed several wildfires this spring, including the most serious one in Muli, southwest China’s Sichuan province, which claimed the lives of 31 firefighters. The wildfire was caused by a lightning strike.

“Due to monsoons in the Indian Ocean, part of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southwest China undergo dry season in winter and spring. Climate change can exacerbates the process: it gets even drier in dry season,” Zhang noted, meanwhile emphasizing that climate change increases the tendency of wildfire outbreak, without causal link to individual cases.

Between 1961 and 2018, the precipitation in the Qinghai in northwest China and Tibet in southwest China recorded a significant increase in precipitation, while other parts of southwest China, that is, parts of the country south of Tibet, including Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, saw a decreasing trend, the CMA report showed.

Meanwhile, the top two forest storage bases of the nation – taking up a great proportion of the 208 million hectares of forest area – are seated in northeast and southwest China.