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Worldwide, an estimated 440 million people were exposed to a wildfire encroaching on their home at some point between 2002 and 2021. This number is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the European Union and has risen by about 40% over two decades. With intense, destructive fires often in the news, it might seem like more land is burning. And indeed, in parts of the world, including western North America, that’s true.
However, globally, our team of fire researchers found that the total area burned actually declined by 26% over those two decades. How is this possible?
Our research shows that the driving reasons for these changes are primarily in Africa, which has the vast majority of all land burned. Agricultural activities there are increasingly fragmenting wildland areas that are prone to burning. Cultivated farm fields and roads can help stop a fire’s spread, but more farms and development also mean more people are exposed to wildfires.
North and South America have both experienced an increase in intense wildfires over the past two decades. For example, the 2018 Camp Fire in California and the 2023 record-breaking Canadian wildfires generated widespread smoke that blanketed large parts of Canada and the eastern United States, even reaching Europe.
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This rise in intense wildfires aligns with the intensification of fire weather around the world. Heat, low humidity, and strong winds make wildfires more likely to spread and harder to control. The number of days conducive to extreme fire behavior has increased by over 50% globally over the past four decades, elevating the odds that a particular region sets a new record for land burned.
But fire weather is not the only influence on wildfire risk. The amount of dry vegetation, whether it’s in continuous stretches or broken up, influences fire risk. Ignition sources such as vehicles and power lines also play a role. Human activities can start fires and fuel climate change, which further dries out the land and amplifies wildfire activity. Fire suppression practices that prevent low-intensity fires from burning can lead to the accumulation of flammable vegetation, raising the risk of intense fires.
In North America, particularly the United States, intensifying fire weather has led to increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that threaten human settlements. In Africa, agricultural expansion has led more people to live in fire-prone areas. In South America, rising drought frequency and severity, intensifying heat waves, and agricultural expansion have amplified wildfire intensity. In Asia, growing populations in fire-prone areas combined with more days of fire-friendly weather increased human exposure to wildfires.
In stark contrast, Africa alone accounts for approximately 85% of all wildfire exposures and 65% of the global burned area. Remarkably, just five central African countries – the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Mozambique, Zambia, and Angola – experience half of all global human exposure to wildfires, despite accounting for less than 3% of the global population.
Communities can take steps to prevent destructive wildfires from spreading. For example, vegetation management such as prescribed fires can avoid fueling intense fires. Public education, policy enforcement, and engineering solutions like vegetation reduction along roads and power lines can help reduce human-caused ignitions. As climate change intensifies fire weather and people continue to move into fire-prone zones, proactive mitigation will be increasingly critical.
