In the past few years, wildfires have broken out around the world at a scale rarely experienced by modern humans. In 2020, fires in the western U.S. charred more than 10 million acres, killed at least 43 people, and inflicted $16.5 billion in damage. Australia’s Black Summer, the devastating fire season that started in late 2019 and burned through early 2020, razed some 4.4 million acres on the continent, directly killing at least 34 people and harming billions of animals.

By 2100, the likelihood of unusually intense fire seasons happening in a given year will have increased by 31 to 57 percent, depending on the rate of global climate change. That’s according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme, which also says that the annual number of wildfires around the globe could rise 50 percent by the end of the century. The rise in the number and frequency of wildfires will exacerbate global warming by releasing the carbon stored in trees. That will create a vicious cycle in which climate change and wildfires intensify each other.

Already, wildfires cost governments billions of dollars, contribute to adverse health outcomes, and claim hundreds of lives each year. Those impacts are projected to get worse, the report says, as a combination of rising temperatures and poor forest management practices give rise to monster wildfire seasons. Wildfires won’t just continue to grow in intensity and frequency, the report warns, they’ll start cropping up in areas that haven’t seen fires in millennia. Even the Arctic, a region that has historically been too wet and cold for large wildfires, could start to regularly host big fires like it did in 2020 and 2021 as global warming transforms permafrost and peatland swamps from soggy, fire-resistant areas into flammable tinderboxes.

Read the full article about wildfires by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.