00:00You may not realise it but being sat in a central London park you could be in a location that
00:05is
00:05susceptible to wildfire. I'm here in Green Park in central London during a heat wave lots of people
00:11are enjoying the sun and the shade opposite one of London's most iconic landmarks but what most
00:17don't realise is that they could be sitting on top of an area at high risk of wildfires. So what
00:23we're what we're seeing here is conditions that are quite good for wildfire ignition and sustained
00:31burning so what we have is high sward grass height here that's very very dry due to this heat wave
00:37that's ongoing at the moment and the location that we're in has a lot of people there's very high
00:43numbers of people here. What we've done is combine all of that information together looking at historic
00:49trends in order to produce this data which shows the locations that are more susceptible
00:55to wildfires starting than other locations. So what our maps are actually showing is this system
01:01of high to low hazard in terms of where a wildfire could start. Now in the UK fires don't start
01:09spontaneously or it's very rare that they would start spontaneously so what we look for and what
01:14we analyse within our models and our data is where you have this kind of typically very very dry
01:19conditions but the combination of that with people which are the main ignition source and typically
01:25you can have a wildfire starting with something like a barbecue that gets out of control or something
01:31as simple as a disposed cigarette butt that's thrown on the floor. It's extremely unlikely you would
01:37see a wildfire actually break out somewhere like this so although we do see signs of susceptibility in the
01:44model that we've created and that would be reacted to very very quickly here in central London. However
01:50that picture is quite different on the outskirts of London where we do see trends in wildfires increasing
01:57so last summer summer 2025 we saw numerous wildfires in fields and parks around the boroughs and edges of
02:05London. Typically the perception of climate change is all related to storms and floods and things that
02:12generally come in winter but what we're seeing here in the UK is that perception changing and we're seeing
02:18climate risks associated with heat in the summer really increasing so you may not realise it but
02:25being sat in a central London park you could be in a location that is susceptible to wildfire.
02:31So
02:31you
02:32are
02:32you
02:33are
02:33you
02:34are
02:34you
02:34are
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