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Compiled daily
Fires seen by satellite in the last 24 hours
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Where this year’s fire season is worse than usual
Countries with a sizeable fire season (at least 10,000 ha by this date in an average year) where more has burned so far this year than on average in 2012–2025.
Burned area by country this year
| Country | Burned so far this year | Against 2012–2025 | Fires seen, last 24 h |
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Show the other — countries
| Country | Burned so far this year | Against 2012–2025 | Fires seen, last 24 h |
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Burned area this year
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Is climate change making wildfires worse?
- More fire weather. Human influence has likely increased fire weather (hot, dry, windy conditions) in some regions of all inhabited continents, and fire weather is projected to increase further with warming (IPCC AR6, 2021).
- Less area burned in total. Worldwide, burned area fell by about a quarter between 1998 and 2015, mostly in savannas and grasslands turned into farmland (Andela et al. 2017).
- More fire in some forests. Fire weather has become more frequent and more extreme almost everywhere since 1979, and in some forests outside the tropics, such as the Pacific US and the far north, burned area rose by about 50% or more in 2001–2019 (Jones et al. 2022).
What drives this
- Drought →Dry soils and vegetation burn more easily.
- Heatwaves →Heat dries fuel and fuels fast-spreading fires.
- El Niño →El Niño years bring dry seasons and big fires to Indonesia and Australia.
What this drives
- Forest loss →Fire is one of the main causes of tree cover loss.
- Permafrost →Arctic fires strip the insulating layer above frozen ground.
How we know this
- Source: NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System): fires detected by the MODIS instruments on the Terra and Aqua satellites. GWIS (Global Wildfire Information System, Copernicus and the EU Joint Research Centre): weekly burned area per country.
- Update cadence: We read both every night. FIRMS files cover the last 24 hours; GWIS updates its country statistics weekly.
- Methods: FIRMS detections with confidence 30 or more, assigned to countries with Natural Earth borders. Burned area as published by GWIS, compared with its 2012–2025 average, minimum and maximum for the same week. The world total adds up the countries.
- Uncertainty: Satellites miss fires under cloud or smoke and small fires; a detection is a 1 km pixel, not one fire. Burned-area mapping misses small burns.
- Limitations: Satellites count all fires, including farm and prescribed burns. Not a warning service: follow your national fire agency.
- Primary data: NASA FIRMS · GWIS · How this page is built