Review article. Fire emissions in the Brazilian Cerrado – dynamics, estimates, management, and their role in the global carbon budget

Estimating fire emissions in the Brazilian Cerrado requires integrating fire parameters, mitigation strategies, and policies. Despite the Cerrado’s significant contribution to global fire emissions, research in this area is still overlooked when compared to other savanna ecosystems. Here, we provide a comprehensive understanding of the Cerrado’s fire emissions within the global carbon budget by examining how fire dynamics, management, and policy shape emissions. We systematically reviewed 77 papers, of which 57% address fire dynamics, management, and policy. While these are key to providing a holistic understanding of fire emissions, linking them to estimates is challenging, especially due to the difficulty in valuing the qualitative aspects of fire. This review only identified two papers that explicitly analyse fire emissions in the Cerrado and found that 17% of papers are led by institutions located within the Cerrado biome area. These numbers reinforce the urgent need for further investigation into the topic. Most papers employ different methods to achieve their results. Evidence suggests growing interest in f ire emissions in the Cerrado, reflected by the rising number of studies over the years. More research is required to provide a more comprehensive understanding of fire emissions in the Cerrado, to understand fire dynamics and emissions, and to identify potential mitigation measures that could help reduce the Cerrado’s contribution to the global carbon budget. This could be achieved by better accounting for emission parameters across the Cerrado’s vegetation types and fire regimes and by including fire management representation in land surface models and using observational data to constrain and assess their utility.