Abstract
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from forest fires are increasingly contributing to atmospheric concentrations of climate-altering gases and represent a growing and poorly constrained component of global carbon budgets, particularly under more frequent droughts and heatwaves. Closing this gap is critical for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, specifically indicator 13.2.2, “Total GHG emissions per year”, urging accurate quantification and monitoring for timely mitigation strategies. Here we introduce FIRE-TRACE, an Earth Observation-based framework integrating satellite data with field-based biomass measurements to improve estimates of forest fuel load and fire emissions. Unlike existing national inventories and global satellite products, FIRE-TRACE resolves spatial variation in burned area and fire severity at the scale of individual fires, enabling emission disaggregation across ecological and administrative units. This work advances SDG 13 by providing a standardised approach, demonstrated for Italy over the period 2018–2023 yet transferable to other countries and time periods, thereby strengthening national reporting capacities and advancing global climate monitoring.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Carabinieri Command of the Forest, Environmental and Agri-food Units (CUFAA) for providing NFI 2015 coordinates, in accordance with the data use agreement established within the activities of the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC) for modelling relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functions in forest environments. We also thank Dr. Fabio Bacchini of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and Dr. Mark Parrington and Dr. Ernst Coffi of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for their valuable feedback on the project.
Funding
This work was supported by the SDGs-EYES project (Grant Agreement No. 101082311), funded by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA) under the Horizon Europe programme. Additional support was provided by PNRR under Mission 4, Component 2 (Notice 3138 of 16/12/2021), as part of the National Research Centre for Agricultural Technologies (AGRITECH) – Project CN_00000022. M.B. acknowledges the support by the Horizon Europe project CONCERTO, Grant Agreement No. 101185000.
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Aquino, C., Bacciu, V., Chiriacò, M.V. et al. An Earth Observation-based Tier 3 framework for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from forest fires in Italy.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-55318-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-55318-x
Source: Ecology - nature.com
