Assaf Inbar

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT The authors declare no conflict of interest. Supporting Information Filename Description gcb17023-sup-0001-Supinfo.docxWord 2007 document , 786.8 KB Data S1. REFERENCES , & (2016). Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(42), 11770–11775. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607171113 , , & (2020).

1 INTRODUCTION Recent catastrophic fires around the world have drawn attention to the need for improved fire risk assessments (Bowman et al., 2020; Duane et al., 2021). The likelihood of fire in terrestrial ecosystems is a function of: (i) the fuel hazard (i.e. the amount, density and three-dimensional distribution of plant biomass, both dead and alive), (ii) fuel dryness, (iii) the weather conditions and (iv) the availability of ignition sources (Boer et al., 2017; Bradstock, 2010).

Most of the drinking water for our cities and towns comes from densely forested catchments in nearby mountains. These catchments act like large, and very cost effective water treatment plants, slowly filtering rainfall through the soil before releasing clean water back to rivers and reservoirs. In fact, this natural water filtration system is so effective that very little additional treatment is required, which minimises the need for large and expensive water treatment plants.