News & Events

World's First Global Wildfire Research Centre Launches with £10million funding

NCEO’s Divisional Director, Professor Martin Wooster is part of the leadership team at King’s College London in the new Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society.

Wildfire is of great importance for landscapes and livelihoods, and for the balance of the planet itself. However, the ability to predict wildfire is inadequate, and our attempts to manage fire are unsuccessful. This Centre will be the first worldwide to address wildfire challenges from a global perspective. Bridging gaps among scales and ecosystems, and integrating perspectives from the physical and social sciences; it will produce unprecedented, trans-disciplinary knowledge required for skilful fire prediction and representation in Earth system research, and for successful fire management by future generations.

The Centre will be led by Dr Apostolos Voulgarakis of Imperial College London and is a joint venture between Imperial, King’s and the University of Reading.

Professor Martin Wooster said, “King’s College London is an internationally-recognised centre of excellence for the study of landscape fire and nature-society interactions, and for the use of Earth observation satellites in quantifying and understand these phenomena. Our Leverhulme Centre will allow King’s and our partner institutions to harness this expertise over the next decade, ultimately to better understand, predict and help manage the changing relations between wildfires, environment and society worldwide.” Professor Wooster is a Divisional Director of NCEO and a Professor of Earth Observation Science. He is an expert on satellite Earth observation and the quantification of landscape fire.

Read more about Professor Wooster’s recent wildfire research here

The establishment of the Centre has come in at a vital time. 2018 was an extraordinary year for wildfires worldwide with tragedies and unprecedented media attention related to landscape burning in California and the Mediterranean. During the last El Niño climate anomaly, fires in the drained tropical peatlands of Southeast Asia were responsible for some of the worst large-scale air quality ever recorded. Fires are also agents of ecological maintenance, and their use as a landscape management tool is integral to the livelihoods of millions worldwide.

The new centre has received £10 million from the Leverhulme Trust. Professor Gordon Marshall, Director of the Trust, said: ‘Leverhulme Trust Research Centres are a major investment in discovery-led inquiry at a time when funding for fundamental scholarship is under great pressure. They are our vote-of-confidence in the quality of the UK’s outstanding researchers. Each Centre will embrace multi-disciplinary and international collaborations designed to bring the highest calibre of expertise to bear on these exciting areas of inquiry. The Trust Board is delighted to add these new awards to its portfolio of long-term research investments.’

Large controlled ‘bonfire’ that had been lit for a test experiment. (Kings College London)