Climate change will likely cause more frequent wildfires in the western United States within the next 30 years and throughout North America and most of Europe by the end of the century primarily because of higher temperatures, scientists report Tuesday.

At the same time, such fires could decrease around equatorial regions, particularly among tropical rainforests, because of increased rainfall, according to a study by an international team of scientists, including some at the University of California, Berkeley.

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"In the long run, we found what most fear — increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet," lead author Max Moritz, a UC Berkeley fire specialist, said in announcing the findings. "But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising."

He said the abrupt changes affect people's livelihoods and add stress to "native plants and animals that are already struggling to adapt to habitat loss."

The study, published in the Ecological Society of America's peer-reviewed journal Ecosphere, used 16 different climate change models to generate what the authors said is one of the most comprehensive projections ever of how climate change might affect global fire patterns.

"Most of the previous wildfire projection studies focused on specific regions of the world, or relied upon only a handful of climate models," said study co-author Katharine Hayhoe, associate professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

The authors said they did not include more temporary fluctuations in climate, such as annual rainfall shifts due to El Niño cycles, because future climate projections are only considered representative for time periods of at least 20 years. They received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Science Foundation and The Nature Conservancy.