Costly and deadly wildfires really are on the rise, new research finds

The Los Angeles fires in January. Blazes in Canada in 2024. Hawaii burning in 2023. It seems as if every year, the planet has more huge wildfires that devastate communities. But so far, the science has been sparse on whether the most economically damaging fires really are on the rise.

Now, a new study has found that catastrophic wildfires with both high economic costs and loss of human life are, indeed, happening more often, and that those fires are strongly linked to climate change. The past decade in particular has seen a significant uptick in costly, deadly fires, according to the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science.

“It’s a pretty big wake-up call,” said Brian Harvey, a professor of forest fire science at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new study. “We live on a flammable planet, and that flammability is increasing.”

Fire is a natural and beneficial part of many ecosystems. But climate change can make fire seasons longer, hotter and drier.

That sets the stage for damaging fires in urban settings, said Calum Cunningham, a wildfire scientist at the University of Tasmania who led the new study.

Some earlier research did not find evidence that disastrous wildfires are becoming more common. A 2016 paper, for instance, looked for trends in damaging fires worldwide from 1984 to 2013 and found little evidence supporting an increase in direct losses from fire.

But the climate is changing rapidly, and in every year following the end of that study, several huge fires occurred. So, Cunningham wanted to know: Are these big, damaging fires really getting more frequent, or is that just a perception?

To find out, the researchers used two datasets, one public and one private, of wildfire-related costs and fatalities around the world between 1980 and 2023. They identified the 200 most costly fires, measuring losses relative to each country’s gross domestic product to avoid biases against lower-income countries. They also included wildfires with 10 or more direct fatalities, bringing the total of most-damaging wildfires to 242.

Based on those 242 wildfires, the researchers found the number of disastrous wildfires had increased more than fourfold from 1980 to 2023. Nearly half of the fires, 43%, were in the last 10 years of the record.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.