The annual “state of wildfires” report from an international team of scientists finds that fires burned at least 3.7m square kilometres of land – an area larger than India – between March 2024 and February 2025.

This is almost 10 per cent below the average annual area burned over the past two decades.

But, due to an increase in wildfires in carbon-rich forests, the CO2 emissions resulting from these fires were almost 10 per cent above average.

The report also zooms in on four of the most prominent extreme wildfire events during this time: southern California; north-east Amazonia; South America’s Pantanal-Chiquitano region; and the Congo Basin.

All of these events were found to have been more likely to occur as a result of human-caused climate change.

The researchers identify that, in some cases, the area burned by these fires was 25-35 times larger than it would have been without global warming.

The report also estimates that more than 100 million people around the world were exposed to wildfires in 2024 and 2025.

These fires are “reshaping lives, economies and ecosystems on a global scale,” one of the report authors, Dr Carmen Steinmann from ETH Zürich, said in a statement.

‘Increasing Extent and Severity’

Scientists from dozens of institutions analyse “extreme wildfires” globally between March 2024 and February 2025 in the second annual edition of the report.

The report explains that the “March-February definition of the global fire season latest global fire season is chosen so as to align with an annual lull in the global fire calendar in the boreal spring months.”

According to the report, the authors “harness‬‭ and‬‭ adopt‬‭ new‬‭ methodologies‬‭ brought‬‭ forward‬‭ by‬‭ the‬‭ scientific‬‭ community”. They add that in future reports, they hope to “enhance the tools presented in this report to predict extremes with increasing lead times, monitor emerging situations in near-real time and explain their causes rapidly.”

Read the full article about global wildfires in 2024 by Orla Dwyer, Yanine Quiroz, Ayesha Tandon, and Giuliana Viglione at Eco-Business.