Fire is the largest source of global vegetation disturbance and livestock farming is amongst humanity’s most pervasive impacts on the biosphere. However, no quantification has been made of livestock farming’s global impact on fire regimes. Here, we quantify the impact of livestock farming on global burned area (BA), through a combination of a new parameterisation of grassland grazing intensity in the Wildfire Human Agency Model and generalised linear models of fire’s many additional biophysical dimensions. Results demonstrate that livestock farming has contributed to the decline in global BA, but perhaps more importantly, also has highly spatially heterogenous impacts. Specifically, results suggest that the contrasting distributions of livestock grazing intensity and pastoral burning likely contribute to the observed BA anomaly in the savanna grasslands of sub-Saharan Africa. Our results serve to highlight the major potential role of ‘prescribed grazing’ as a climate change adaptation measure and, more broadly, reiterate the importance of interactions between human and biophysical processes in driving the distribution of fire on Earth.

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