State of Wildfires Report 2024 - 2025
CITAB Professor and Researcher Paulo Fernandes was the coordinator of the European panel for this Report.
Human-driven climate change is fundamentally altering wildfire risks worldwide. New analyses of the 2024-25 fire season add to the growing evidence base that warming is making extreme wildfires more likely and more severe. Some of the most prominent extreme wildfire events of the global fire season, in Los Angeles and parts of South America, were 2-3 times more likely due to climate change, and the area burned by wildfires during those events was 25-35 times larger.
The consequences of extreme wildfires are being felt worldwide. Extreme events of the 2024-25 fire season brought fatalities across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, mass evacuations and record-breaking economic damage in Los Angeles, hazardous air pollution in Brazil, Bolivia, India, and California, and vast greenhouse gas emissions from carbon-rich forests in South America and Canada. The path to avoiding these consequences is clear: reduce global emissions rapidly, strengthen fire governance, and invest in adaptation to build resilience now.
The State of Wildfires Report, published in Earth System Science Data, is our second annual global assessment of extreme wildfire events. It documents when and where extreme wildfires events occurred, their impacts, why they happened, and the role of climate change. The project unites world-leading experts from more than 60 institutes across 20 countries.