State of Wildfires 2024-2025

The 2024–2025 fire season saw extreme wildfires across the Americas, with events in the Amazon, Pantanal, and Los Angeles emerging from the tails of historical distributions and burning substantially larger areas than would have occurred without human-induced climate change. These amplified fire extents translated into severe impacts on carbon emissions, air quality, and communities. These are the key findings in the latest State of Wildfires report: an annual, community-led synthesis developed in response to the increasing prevalence of high-impact wildfire events worldwide.

Globally over this period, wildfires burned approximately 3.7 million km², exposed around 100 million people and over USD 200 billion of infrastructure, and generated more than eight billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions, which was around 10 % above the long-term average, driven largely by intense forest fires in South America and Canada. Impacts were particularly severe in the Amazon and Pantanal, where large-scale forest and wetland fires caused extreme smoke exposure and major economic losses, and in Los Angeles, where January 2025 fires resulted in mass evacuations and substantial damage.

In several regions, climate change substantially increased burned area, with fires approximately four times larger in Amazonia, 35 times larger in the Pantanal–Chiquitano, 25 times larger in Southern California, and nearly three times larger in the Congo Basin compared to a world without human-induced climate change. In these regions, we found anomalous weather created conditions for extreme fires, with prolonged drought dominating in tropical systems, and compound heat, wind, and fuel build-up shaping fires in California. Projections indicate that events of comparable scale will become markedly more frequent in tropical regions under continued warming, while strong mitigation can substantially limit, but not eliminate, the additional risk.

The State of Wildfires report (https://stateofwildfires.com/latest-report/) snapshot of globally extreme wildfire impacts and drivers, providing an evolving evidence base to support preparedness, mitigation, and adaptation as wildfire risk intensifies. Looking ahead, the 2025–2026 edition will expand coverage to emerging hotspots, and we welcome contributions that help capture the next generation of assessments of high-impact wildfire events.