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Wildfires on a changing planet

Olivia Haas,I. Prentice,S. Harrison

Published 2026 in Nature Communications

ABSTRACT

The distribution of wildfires on Earth will change as climate, land-use, and vegetation change. We use global empirical models of burnt area, fire size and fire intensity to explore future wildfire trajectories under ~1.5 and 3-4 °C warming with middle of the road future socio-economic conditions. Even under ~1.5 °C warming we find a change in wildfire patterns by the end of the 21st century with reduced burning in tropical regions driven by changes in human activity but larger and more intense wildfires in extra-tropical regions driven by changes in climate and CO2. With low climate change mitigation, burnt areas increase greatly across all vegetation types, overwhelming the current global decline. These findings suggest that even with ambitious climate change mitigation, current fire-suppression policies will fail in much of the world and mitigation scenarios that rely on expanding forest areas will be unrealistic unless they are designed with wildfire risks in mind. Climate and land-use changes will redistribute fire across the planet. Larger, more frequent, and intense wildfires are projected in extra-tropical regions, while human-driven declines in fire activity are reversed under the highest degrees of warming.

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