Extreme Wildfires Are Twice as Common as They Were 20 Years Ago
Extreme wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity globally, data show for the first time
A firefighter works the scene as flames push towards homes during the Creek fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
The frequency at which extreme fires occur around the world has more than doubled during the past two decades, according to an analysis of satellite data1. The trend is driven by the exponential growth of extreme fires across vast portions of Canada, the western United States and Russia, researchers say.
The results provide the first solid evidence to support a nagging suspicion that many scientists and others have had as they watch a seemingly endless series of cataclysmic infernos scorch ecosystems and communities: wildfires have increased somehow, and climate change is almost certainly a factor.
“It’s the extreme events that we care about the most, and those are the ones that are increasing quite significantly,” says lead author Calum Cunningham, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. “Surprisingly, this has never been shown at a global scale.”
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Heating up
Researchers have already documented an increase in wildfire activity across the western forests of the United States2, but they have had a harder time pinning down a clear global trend. One confounding factor is that the amount of land burned annually has been declining, in part owing to a steady reduction in fire activity in African grasslands and savannahs.
For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and…
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