WASHINGTON (AP) – The planet’s most troublesome and most expensive wildfires are burning four times more frequently than in the 1980s, due to human-focused climate change and people getting closer to the fields.
Journal Science research focuses on wildfires around the world, not the most common measurement stick, the burning acres, but rather the economic and human damage they cause. The study concluded that there was “climate-related escalation of socially tragic wildfires.”
A team of Australia, US and German firefighters have calculated the 200 most harmful fires since 1980, taking inflation into account, based on the percentage of gross domestic product losses at the time. The frequency of these events has increased by about 4.4 times between 1980 and 2023, says research authors of Calum Cunningham, a pario geographer at the University of Tasmania Fire Centre in Australia.
“It shows beyond the shadow of doubt that there is a major wildfire crisis in our hands,” Cunningham said.
In the past decade of the study, approximately 43% of the most harmful fires have occurred. In the 1980s, Globe averaged two of these devastating fires, hitting four times a year. From 2014 to 2023, the world averaged nearly nine years, including 13 in 2021. The number of these devastating hells rose significantly in 2015, saying it was “consistent with increasingly extreme climatic conditions.” The survey date ended in 2023, but the past two years have been even more extreme, Cunningham said.
Europe and North America lead the number of these economically damaging fires. That’s especially bad Mediterranean Sea around Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal And in the western US surrounding California, the climate is prone to sudden dryness. It gets worse due to global warmingsaid Cunningham.
Researchers also found three times more frequently than one fire killed at least 10 people. 2018 Paradise Fire, 2023 Lahaina Fire And they are Los Angeles in 2025.
Cunningham often sees researchers looking at how many acres of fires burn as a measuring stick, but he called the flaws because it doesn’t really show any impact on people and isn’t as important as economics and life. The fires in Lahaina in Hawaii were not that big, but they burned many buildings and killed many people, making it more meaningful than those in the less populated area.
“We need to target important fires, and they are fires that cause great ecological destruction because they are burning so violently,” Cunningham said.
However, economic data is difficult to obtain in many countries that keep that information private, preventing global trends and sums from being calculated. So Cunningham and his colleagues were able to acquire more than 40 years of global economic day from Munich RE and combine it with a public database from. International Disaster Databasenot so complete, but collected by the Catholic University of Louban in Belgium.
The study examined “fire weather,” a hot, dry, windy state that extreme fires are more likely and dangerous, and found that those conditions were increasing, creating links to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
“We first have a relationship that all disasters occurred during extreme weather conditions, and there is also a strong tendency that these conditions become more common as a result of climate change. That’s uncontroversial,” Cunningham said. “That’s a set of evidence to say that climate change has a major impact on creating conditions that are at least suitable for large-scale fire disasters.”
Without climate change overlayed on humans, there are still catastrophic fires in the world, but not many.
There are other factors. People are approaching fire-prone areas, Cunningham said, and are known as the Wildland City Interface. And society doesn’t deal with dead leaves that become fuel, he said. However, he said these factors are difficult to quantify compared to climate change.
“This is an innovative study from the perspective of the data sources being employed, and it supports the expectations of common sense. Fires tend to occur in densely populated areas where fires that cause large-scale deaths and economic damage tend to occur in extreme fire weather conditions that become common due to climate change.”
Mike Flanigan, the fire department at Thompson Rivers University in Canada, said the study not only made sense but was a bad sign of the future. Flanigan, who is not part of the study, said, “As the frequency and intensity of extreme fires and droughts increase, the chances of disastrous fires increase, so we need to do more to prepare better.”
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