Mapping Forest Wildfire Risk of the World

The occurrence of global forest fires is over 200,000 times per year, which has great impact on both ecological environment and economic developments around the world. This paper presents a quantitative evaluation of the global risk of burned areas based on the MODIS wildfire products and on natural disaster system theory. The occurrence of forest wildfire was taken as a key indicator of the hazard and the average burned area per forest wildfire was taken as a key indicator of exposure vulnerability. The information diffusion theory was adopted to solve the problem of an insufficient amount of remote sensing data. Finally, we compiled the global maps of vulnerability, hazards, and risks with different return periods at a 0.1° spatial resolution. The results indicated that the high-risk areas of forest wildfire are mainly distributed in central Africa and South America, northwest of Southeast Asia, central and eastern Siberia and the northern part of North America. Russia, Canada, Brazil, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the top five countries facing the highest risk of forest fire, while China ranks 11th in the world.