Study shows the world is far more ablaze now with damaging fires than in the 1980s

The most nasty and most expensive forest fires of the earth are fires four times more often than they did in the 1980s due to climate change caused by humans and people approaching Wildlands, a new study revealed.

A study in the journal Science Look at world forest fires, not by burnt hectares which are the most common measurement stick, but by the most difficult to calculate the economic and human damage they cause. The study concluded that there was a “climbing linked to the climate of socially disastrous forest fires”.

A team of scientists from Australian, American and German firefighters has calculated the 200 most damaging fires since 1980 according to the percentage of damage to the gross domestic product at the time, taking into account inflation. The frequency of these events increased by around 4.4 times from 1980 to 2023, said the main author of the Calum Cunningham study, a pyrogeographer at the Fire Center at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

“This shows that the shadow of a doubt that we have a major forest crisis in our hands,” said Cunningham.

About 43% of the 200 most damaging fires have occurred in the last 10 years of the study. In the 1980s, the globe had an average of two of these catastrophic fires per year and a few occasions reached four per year. From 2014 to 2023, Le Monde was on average almost nine years a year, including 13 in 2021. It noted that the number of these devastating infernos increased sharply in 2015, which “coincided with increasingly extreme climatic conditions”. Although the study date ended in 2023, the last two years have been even more extreme, said Cunningham.

Europe and North America lead into the number of these economically damaging fires. This is particularly worse in the Mediterranean around Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal and in the west of the United States of California, due to the subject of a sudden drought, aggravated by global warming, said Cunningham.

The researchers also found a triplet in the frequency in which only one fire killed at least 10 people, like Paradise Fire of 2018, Lahaina Fire of 2023 and those of Los Angeles in 2025.

Cunningham said that researchers often look at how many acres a fire burns like a measurement stick, but he called it imperfect because it really does not show the effect on people, the area that does not matter as much as economics and life. Lahaina’s fire in Hawaii was not big, but he burned a lot of buildings and killed a lot of people, so it was more significant than a little populated regions, he said.

“We must target the fires that matter. And it is the fires that cause major ecological destruction because they burn too intensely,” said Cunningham.

But economic data is difficult to obtain with many countries by keeping this private information, preventing world trends and totals from being calculated. Cunningham and his colleagues were therefore able to obtain more than 40 years of global economic date of the Munich Re insurance giant, then combine it with the public database of the international disaster database, which is not as complete but which is collected by the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

The study examined the “fire time” which is hot, dry and windy conditions which make extreme and more dangerous extreme fires and have found that these conditions increase, creating a connection with the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas.

“We first have this connection that all the disasters have occurred while the weather conditions are extreme. We also have a strong trend in the fact that these conditions become more common due to climate change. It is indisputable,” said Cunningham. “It is therefore a line of evidence to say that climate change has a significant effect on at least the creation of the conditions that are suitable for a major fire disaster.”

If there was no climate change of human origin, the world would always have devastating fires, but not as much, it said, “we load the dice in one direction by increasing temperatures.”

There are other factors. People are getting closer to areas subject to fires, called the Wildland-Urban interface, said Cunningham. And society does not understand dead foliage which becomes fuel, he said. But these factors are more difficult to quantify compared to climate change, he said.

“This is an innovative study in terms of data sources used, and this mainly confirms the expectations of common sense: fires causing major deaths and economic damage tends to be those of densely populated areas and to occur during the conditions of extreme weather which become more common due to climate change,” said Jacob Bendix, a geography teacher and the environment University who studies fires, but who has not been part of this research team.

Not only does the study make sense, but it is a bad sign for the future, said Mike Flannigan, fire researcher at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. Flannigan, who was not part of the research, said: “While the frequency and intensity of extreme fires and drought increase the probability that disastrous fires increase, so we have to do more to be better prepared.”

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