The area of wildfires in Borneo during drought years turns out to be ten times larger than during non-drought years, an international research team reports in Nature Climate Change of this week. The fires recurrently affecting Borneo’s humid tropical ecosystems have negative influence on the biodiversity and lead to large CO2 emissions, affecting atmospheric composition and regional climate processes. Future droughts in wet tropical regions will likely increase in frequency and severity, and consequently the fire risk, the team says. The researchers from Wageningen University & Research, Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia, University of East Anglia and the Center for International Forestry Research analysed the spatially distributed pattern of hydrological drought, that is the drought in groundwater recharge, in Borneo using a simple transient water balance model driven by monthly climate data from the period 1901-2015. Their findings provide evidence that there has been a drying trend in terms of affected area, since the start of the last century. Droughts and wildfires The team also explored the link between hydrological drought and wildfire using the monthly fire area burnt from the spatially distributed Global Fire Emission Dataset from the period 1996-2015. They classified years in this period into drought and non-drought…