Trends of Climatic Extremes and Their Correlation with Wildfire Occurences in Margalla Hills National Park, Islamabad

Abstract

Climate change, fuel load, and human activities are the three major components of wildfire, but the relationship between long-term change in climatic extremes and fire activity is yet to be tested in the protected mountain landscapes of Pakistan. This study compared the climatic changes of the last 30 years in Margalla Hills National Park (MHNP) near Islamabad with the fire record of the park during 1996 to 2025. The daily maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation, relative humidity and wind speed were analysed, and 27 core Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices for temperature and precipitation extreme were computed using ClimPACT2 Package in RStudio. The Modified Mann-Kendall test, Sen's slope estimator and Innovative Trend Analysis were applied to examine trends at monthly, seasonal and annual scales; associations between fire frequency and burned area were quantified using Spearman's rank correlation. While warming was reported in Islamabad and the Potohar Plateau, both maximum and minimum temperature decreased (slope −0.0279°C/yr and −0.027°C/yr respectively) with ITA showing significant cooling in later years, while precipitation and humidity increased and winds were mostly calm. Fire frequency and burned area both decreased significantly, with burned area decreasing at a higher rate than fire frequency, meaning that fire size has decreased but not necessarily the number of fires; the number of fires increased significantly in the summer with Sen’s slope of 0.048 recently from July to September. The strongest relationships were at the lower end of the temperature spectrum, with more burned area being correlated with warmer coldest nights (rho = 0.49, p < 0.01), and fewer frost days being correlated with less burned area, while winter heavy-rainfall days and June rainfall totals were both correlated with reduced burned area, and the heat index was not significantly correlated. Because climate affects fire primarily through fuel dryness, rather than ignition, which remains predominantly human-driven, MHNP serves as a cooler microclimate than its warmer surroundings. This study thus contributes to a deeper understanding of the climate wildfire nexus and provides an essential baseline for evidence-based forest management, climate adaptation, and disaster risk reduction. Future efforts must prioritize early resource deployment and strict access controls, supported by future research to develop a locally calibrated Pakistan’s fire-weather index.