State of Wildfires 2025–2026

Abstract

Abstract. The global geography, behaviour, and impact of fires are shifting, as spatially varying human influences interact with a visibly changing climate. The State of Wildfires project systematically tracks global and regional fire activity, analyses the causes of prominent extreme wildfire events for three focal regions, and projects the likelihood of similar events under future climate scenarios. During the March 2025–February 2026 fire season, global burned area (BA) was 18 % below the 2002–2024 average and global fire carbon (C) emissions were also 20–31 % below average, making it one of the lowest years on record. Yet this globally low fire year still produced widespread regional impacts. Canada experienced a third consecutive extreme fire year, with national fire C emissions at nearly triple the average since 2002, 70,000 evacuations, and reported direct losses of USD 360 million. In the Midwestern Canadian Shield Forests, the epicentre of Canada’s anomalous season, we find that anthropogenic climate change has doubled the likelihood of extreme fire weather in this region and made the observed BA around 61 times more likely during July–August 2025, while BA extent in the region is 46 times greater. Many parts of Europe also experienced record or high-ranking BA and fire C emissions, including in Spain, Portugal, and the UK, and a record USD 4.11 billion of physical assets were exposed to fire across the continent. Direct fatalities occurred in Türkiye (17), Spain (8), Portugal (6), Cyprus (2), Greece (1) and France (1), and evacuations in Türkiye, Spain, and Greece totalled over 110,000. In the Northwest Iberian Peninsula, we find that extreme fire weather over August 2025 was around 3 times more likely due to climate change. Under a high-emissions scenario (SSP3-7.0), fires of the same return interval are likely to burn about 78 % more area by the end of the century, with some projections within the same scenario suggesting increases of around sevenfold. In Chile and northwest Argentina, January–February 2026 fires caused 23 fatalities, displaced 55,000 people and threatened a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the Chilean Temperate Forests and Matorral, the epicentre, we find that BA was around 36 % larger due to anthropogenic climate change. Across all focal regions in this report, the conditions for extreme fire developed gradually through months of precipitation deficits, cumulative drying and, in the case of Northwest Iberia, antecedent fuel accumulation aided by preceding wet periods. Continued climate change is expected to intensify these hydroclimatic extremes, yet mitigation has already reduced projected end-of-century wildfire risk: under a high-end emissions pathway (SSP3-7.0), the extreme BA events in our focal regions are projected to be 4–23 % smaller than they would have been under a worst-case emissions scenario no longer considered credible (SSP5-8.5). Meeting the Paris targets (SSP1-2.6) would further reduce BA during these events by 5–36 % across our focal regions. By integrating expertise from across the wildfire community with state-of-the-art observations, data, and modelling, this annual report advances understanding of regional wildfire extremes and their drivers, providing evidence to inform policy, preparedness, mitigation, adaptation, and broader societal benefit. Seventeen new and updated datasets created in this report are available from the State of Wildfires Project's Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/communities/stateofwildfiresproject/).