Tackling the haze in South-East Asia: a call to COP21 Paris

Reprint of my original article published first in the blog of The Grantham Institute.

Peat fires are raging in Indonesia and their extent is staggering. The dry season is not over and NASA satellites have already counted more than 12,000 active fires, which have emitted in excess of 1.6 Gton of carbon dioxide equivalent. This is more than Japan’s annual emissions and close to the footprint of the whole of India. In fact, if peat fire emissions were considered, Indonesia would be the 4th highest emitting country in the world. With COP21 climate negotiations on carbon emissions due to start in just over a week, this widespread haze is choking the population and fauna.

Driven by energy goals and climate change, international efforts are moving towards reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and limiting the burning of fossil fuels. However, by ignoring smouldering fires, a major source of greenhouse gases is being overlooked.

The long slow burn

Smouldering fire is a natural phenomenon that burns Earth’s organic-rich deposits, primarily peatlands, soils and coal. Sometimes termed smouldering megafires, these are the largest and longest burning fires on Earth and take place not only in Indonesia, but also in Siberia, Alaska, Florida and Australia to name a few.

Peat megafires destroy essential peatland ecosystems, and release huge quantities of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane, making up 15% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. This is the same amount attributed to the whole of the European Union, or all the vehicles worldwide – and yet it is not accounted for in global carbon budgets.

Moreover, the burning of deep peat affects older soil carbon that has not been part of the active carbon cycle for centuries to millennia, and thus creates a positive feedback to the climate system (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The peat fire problem at the Earth scale, including climate feedback. By G Rein, CC BY 3.0 license

Why so large?

Smouldering combustion is the slow, low temperature, flameless burning of porous fuels. It is sustained by the heat released when oxygen directly oxidises the carbon on the surface of organic soil particles. Once ignited, subsurface organic layers such as those in peatlands or carbon-rich soils burn slowly for long periods of time, spreading deep into the ground and over extensive areas.

Possible ignition events can be natural (e.g. lightning, self-heating, volcanic eruption) or anthropogenic (land management, accidental ignition, arson). Smouldering fires can be initiated by weak sources of ignition and are typically the most difficult to extinguish. Smouldering suppression requires much larger amounts of water than extinguishing flaming fires (it requires actual flooding of the land).

Easy ignition and difficult suppression make smouldering fire the most persistent type of combustion phenomenon on Earth. These fires burn for very long periods of time, lasting months, years, or even decades, despite extensive rains, weather changes and fire-fighting attempts. Peat fires have been active in Indonesia this season for the last more six months or more. They have become endemic in some areas of the world.

Figure 2. Visual and overlaid infrared imaging of radial smouldering spread over a sample of peat ignited at the centre. Photo by Rackauskaite, Huang and Rein (CC BY 3.0 license) http://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/sss/2014/10/01/soils-at-imaggeo-fire-watch-constellation

The Triple Challenge

Given the scale of the problem, relatively little action is being taken. I have identified three major challenges hampering global action:

Challenge #1 – Scientific understanding is poor: There are still large gaps in our knowledge of how smouldering fires ignite, spread or extinguish, which impedes the development of any successful mitigation strategy. Poor scientific knowledge on smouldering even leads to fatal misunderstandings and confusion between flaming and smouldering combustion.

Challenge #2 – Non-existent mitigation technologies: Smouldering megafires are routinely fought across the globe with techniques that were developed for flaming fires. These techniques are ineffective for smouldering fires because the heat transfer and the chemistry involved are completely different. For instance, aerial tankers do nothing to stop smouldering fires because flooding is required instead, and satellite monitoring substantially underestimates the size of peat fires because smouldering can spread underground.

Challenge #3- Topic fragmented among scientific disciplines: Smouldering megafires are an intrinsically multidisciplinary theme requiring collaboration by combustion scientists, ecologists, atmosphere scientists and biochemists.

These three challenges must be overcome before effective mitigation strategies can be implemented. While the largest fires on Earth continue releasing naturally stored carbon into the atmosphere, we are failing to protect both people and the planet.

A Call to Paris

We can reduce the worldwide burden of smouldering megafires and create new technology drivers by pursuing greater experimental understanding and up-scaling our research in the field.

Science is an essential enabler of understanding of peat fires. By strengthening the importance of fundamental knowledge and by consolidating the disciplines interested in the phenomenon, I believe combustion science will serve as the basis for tackling wildfires.

COP21 in Paris has the chance to mobilise the resources needed to advance the science that can lead the way and pioneer technologies against this Earth-scale but unconventional source of emissions.

Further Reading

• G Rein, Smouldering Fires and Natural Fuels, by G Rein, Chapter 2 in: Fire Phenomena in the Earth System – An Interdisciplinary Approach to Fire Science, pp. 15–34. Wiley and Sons, 2013. DOI:10.1002/9781118529539.ch2. http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/28419
• G Rein, The long slow burn of smouldering peat mega-fires, Wildfire Magazine, May-June 2014, issue on Large Fires. http://wildfiremagazine.org/article/the-long-slow-burn-of-smouldering-peat-mega-fires
• M Turetsky, B Benscoter, S Page, G Rein, GR van der Werf, A Watts, Global vulnerability of peatlands to fire and carbon loss, Nature Geoscience 8 (1), pp. 11-14, 2015. http://dxoi.org/10.1038/NGEO2325

Our Student at the Royal Welcome of Chinese President

I was delighted to learn that my PhD student Xinyan Huang attended the Royal Welcome and Honour Guard Inspection held by Queen Elizabeth II for the Chinese President Xi Jinping. This is a traditional ceremonial welcome to foreign leaders visiting the UK. It took place last Tuesday near Buckingham Palace with the presence of senior royal family members and political leaders.

Xinyan was invited by Lord Chamberlain. There were 80 guests, 40 Chinese and 40 British. He was invited as one of three students representing the 150,000 Chinese students in UK. An important factor for being chosen for the honor is that Xinyan was the only student from Imperial College winning the 2014 National Award for Outstanding Chinese Student Studying Abroad given annually worldwide by the China Scholarship Council.

 
Xinhua media describes it like this: "With 41 rounds of gun salute fired from Green Park and 62 from the Tower of London, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, bathed in rare London sunshine, formally welcomed Xi and Peng at the Royal pavilion on Horse Guards Parade".

Xinyan on the guest stage with the Honour Guard in the back.

Note: Xinyan is graduating from Imperial College soon and joins the University of California at Berkeley as a postdoc in the laboratory of Prof Fernandez-Pello.

PhD Studentship in Heat Transfer at Imperial College London

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the field of heat transfer and artificial intelligence funded by EPSRC and Arup.

2013 facade fire in Grozny. Photo from huffingtonpost

The research project, named INERSKIN, will develop a toolkit for fire safety optimisation of building façades. With a drive for thermally efficient buildings and sustainability, flammable insulation materials like polymers are more frequently introduced in the design of façades system. Because of the importance of façades and the increasing number of high rise buildings worldwide, it is critical that the interaction of materials and their performance in the event of a fire is understood, modelled and improved. INERSKIN will use artificial intelligence techniques and the state of the art of computational heat transfer to optimize their fire safety.

The student will join the Hazelab, the multidisciplinary research group led by Dr Guillermo Rein and part of the Thermofluids Division in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The purpose of the group is to reduce the worldwide burden of accidental fires and protect people, their property, and the environment. To do so, Hazelab studies computationally and experimentally heat transfer processes, condensed-phase chemistry and thermodynamics of reactive solids.

You will be an enthusiastic and self-motivated person who meets the academic requirements for enrollment for the PhD degree at Imperial College London. You will have a degree in engineering or physics, and an inquiring and rigorous approach to research together with disciplined work habits. Interests in heat transfer and artificial intelligence are essential. Good team-working and communication skills are essential. Knowledge in fire science and building design are encouraged but not essential prior the project.

Candidates should fulfill the eligibility EPSRC criteria for stipend and fees (UK resident for at least 3 years). Please check your suitability at the following web site: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/Pages/eligibility.aspx

For further details of the post, contact Dr Guillermo Rein g.rein@imperial.ac.uk with up-to-date curriculum vitae.

Closing date: 30th April 2016.

Welcome Virginia to Imperial Hazelab

Dr Virginia Alonso has joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London as postdoc in my research group, Imperial Hazelab.

Virginia is from Santander, beautiful city in the North of Spain. She graduated with an MSc in Physics and an PhD in Fire Evacuation Modelling at University of Cantabria, Spain, as member of the GIDAI group. She has also been a visiting scholar at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST).

At Hazelab, she is involved in the project N-LAYERS to conduct a study and write a white paper where a holistic view of fire protection engineering is created, and the role of prevention is examined. Fire safety is made of a series of layers (e.g., prevention, fuel control, passive and active systems, evacuation, and structural response). All layers have a role in fire safety, but not all layers are equally important, effective or costly. In this project, Virginia aims to study in-depth the role of prevention in a systemic view of fire protection.