Wildfires devastating richer areas but fewer hectares burned globally – study | Wildfires

A study has found that wealthier parts of the world are likely to experience “devastating” bushfires in 2025, with the area devastated by the flames falling as it does around the world.

Last year, catastrophic fires in California, Canada, Europe and South Korea cost lives, homes and businesses. But the review found that the 335 million hectares burned was the second lowest since 2002; This turned out to be largely due to the expansion of African farms, which fragmented the landscape and prevented the spread of large savannah fires.

Disasters in 2025 included the Scottish “mega fire” that burned more than 100,000 hectares (contributing to the UK breaking the record for area burned) and the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which were among the most destructive in US history.

Record-breaking fires in Spain and Portugal burned more than half a million hectares, while South Korea experienced its largest and deadliest wildfire season in history.

The research found that more than 38 percent of insured losses from weather disasters in 2025 were due to fires.

“2025 shows that a ‘quiet’ global fire year could still be devastating,” said Matthew Jones, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study. “We are seeing a growing disconnect between total area burned and real-world impacts.”

Changes in land use mean wildfires are burning the planet less frequently than in the past; But global warming is creating conditions that allow fires to spread, increasing the danger in what researchers call the wildland-urban interface, where people are most at risk.

Adverse weather conditions fueled by carbon pollution turned some of last year’s fires into explosive infernos.

In Southern California and South Korea, high winds and dry vegetation pushed fires into densely populated areas, causing “extraordinary deaths, mass evacuations, and massive infrastructure losses,” researchers found. Meanwhile, drought and extreme heat in the Mediterranean caused severe fires from Portugal to Türkiye.

“These conditions do not cause fires, but in the event of a fire we have more flammable material than normal – because it is drier – and wind conditions that fan the flames,” said David Garcia, an applied mathematician at the University of Alicante who was not involved in the study. “This increases the likelihood of large fires occurring.”

An attribution study Garcia co-authored last year found that the extreme weather conditions that fanned the flames in Portugal and Spain last year were 39 times more likely to be due to climate disruption. “If we continue to warm the planet, large-scale fires will continue to increase,” he said.

The overall reduction in global burned area has led to carbon dioxide emissions falling to the third lowest level in history.

But extreme wildfire emissions were recorded in Canada for the third year in a row. Boreal forests in North America have released nearly 4 billion tons of CO2 since 2023₂exceeds the total emissions of the previous 15-year period.

In addition to warming the planet, pollutants in fire smoke are also causing large numbers of people to die from breathing polluted air. Toxic particles released by Canadian wildfires will kill 82,000 people in 2023, according to a study published in September; The smog even choked cities in the United States, Europe and Africa.

Adrián Regos, a landscape ecologist at Spain’s Biological Mission in Galicia who was not involved in the research, said last year’s events showed how a relatively small number of extreme fires can dominate the ecological, social and economic consequences of an entire fire season.

“The broader pattern highlighted by this study is consistent with what we observe in Southern Europe: although total burned area may fluctuate from year to year, climate change increases the likelihood of extreme fire and weather conditions, and fuel accumulation associated with rural abandonment makes many regions more vulnerable to large, fast-moving fires,” he said.

“The challenge is therefore not only to reduce the number of fires, but also to increase the resilience of landscapes and communities to extreme events.”