wildfire

Wildfire smoke is an emerging nationwide crisis for the United States. Supercharged by climate change, blazes are swelling into monsters that consume vast landscapes and entire towns. A growing body of evidence reveals that these conflagrations are killing far more people than previously known, as smoke travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, aggravating conditions like asthma and heart disease. One study, for instance, estimated that January’s infernos in Los Angeles didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally reckons, but 440 or more once you factor in the smoke. Another recent study estimated that wildfire haze already kills 40,000 Americans a year, which could increase to 71,000 by 2050.

Two additional studies published in December paint an even grimmer picture of the crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere. The first finds that emissions of greenhouse gases and airborne particles from wildfires globally may be 70 percent higher than once believed. The second finds that Canada’s wildfires in 2023 significantly worsened childhood asthma across the border in Vermont. Taken together, they illustrate the desperate need to protect public health from the growing threat of wildfire smoke, like better monitoring air quality with networks of sensors.

The emissions study isn’t an indictment of previous estimates, but a revision of them based on new data. Satellites have spied on wildfires for decades, though in a somewhat limited way — they break up the landscape into squares measuring 500 by 500 meters, or about 1,600 by 1,600 feet. If a wildfire doesn’t fully fill that space, it’s not counted. This new study increases that resolution to 20 by 20 meters (roughly 66 feet by 66 feet) in several key fire regions, meaning it can capture multitudes of smaller fires.

Individually, tinier blazes are not producing as much smoke as the massive conflagrations that are leveling cities in the American West. But “they add up, and add up big time,” said Guido van der Werf, a wildfire researcher at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper. “They basically double the amount of burned area we have globally.”

With the 500-meter satellite data, the previous estimate was around 400 million hectares charred each year. Adding the small fires bumps that up to 800 million hectares, roughly the size of Australia. In some parts of the world, like Europe and Southeast Asia, burned area triples or even quadruples with this improved resolution. While scientists used to think annual wildfire emissions were around 2 gigatons of carbon, or about a fifth of what humanity produces from burning fossil fuels, that’s now more like 3.4 gigatons with this new estimate.

The type of fire makes a huge difference in the emissions, too. A forest fire has a large amount of biomass to burn — brushes, grasses, trees, sometimes even part of the soil — and turn into carbon dioxide and methane and particulate matter, but a grass fire on a prairie has much less. Blazes also burn at dramatically different rates: Flames can race quickly through woodland, but carbon-rich ground known as peat can smolder for days or weeks. Peat fires are so persistent, in fact, that when they ignite in the Arctic, they can remain hidden as snow falls, then pop up again as temperatures rise and everything melts. Scientists call them zombie fires. “It really matters where you’re burning and also how intense the fire can become,” van der Werf said.

But why would a fire stay small, when we’ve seen in recent years just how massive and destructive these blazes can get? It’s partly due to fragmentation of the landscape: Roads can prevent them from spreading, and firefighters stop them from reaching cities. And in general, a long history of fire suppression means they’re often quickly extinguished. (Ironically this has also helped create some monsters, because vegetation builds up across the landscape, ready to burn. This shakes up the natural order of things, in which low-intensity fires from lightning strikes have cleared dead brush, resetting an ecosystem for new growth. Which is why Indigenous tribes have long done prescribed burns.) Farmers, too, burn their waste biomass and obviously prevent the flames from getting out of hand.

Whereas in remote areas, like boreal forests in the far north, lightning strikes typically ignite fires, the study finds that populated regions produce a lot of smaller fires. In general, the more people dotting the landscape, the more sources of ignition: cigarette butts, electrical equipment producing sparks, even chains dragging from trucks.

Yes, these smaller fires are less destructive than the behemoths, but they can still be catastrophic in a more indirect way, by pouring smoke into populated areas. “Those small fires are not the ones that cause the most problems,” van der Werf said. “But of course they’re more frequent, close to places where people live, and that also has a health impact.”

That is why the second study on asthma is so alarming. Researchers compared the extremely smoky year of 2023 in Vermont to 2022 and 2024, when skies were clearer. They were interested in PM 2.5, or particulate matter smaller than 2.5 millionths of a meter, from wildfire smoke pouring in from Quebec, Canada. “That can be especially challenging to dispel from lungs, and especially irritating to those airways,” said Anna Maassel, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study. “There is research that shows that exposure to wildfire smoke can have much longer-term impacts, including development of asthma, especially for early exposure as a child.”

This study, though, looked at the exacerbation of asthma symptoms in children already living with the condition. While pediatric asthma patients typically have fewer attacks in the summer because they’re not in school and constantly exposed to respiratory viruses and other indoor triggers, the data showed that their conditions were much less controlled during the summer of 2023 as huge wildfires burned. (Clinically, “asthma control” refers to milder symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath, as well as severe problems like attacks. So during that summer, pediatric patients were reporting more symptoms.) At the same time, climate change is extending growing seasons, meaning plants produce more pollen, which also exacerbates that chronic disease. “All of those factors compound to really complicate what healthcare providers have previously understood to be a safe time of year for children with asthma,” Maassel said.

Researchers are also finding that as smoke travels through the atmosphere, it transforms. It tends to produce ozone, for instance, that irritates the lungs and triggers asthma. “There’s also the potential for increased formation of things like formaldehyde, which is also harmful to human health. It’s a hazardous air pollutant,” said Rebecca Hornbrook, who studies wildfire smoke at the National Center for Atmospheric Research but wasn’t involved in either study, though a colleague was involved in the emissions one. (Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle NCAR, which experts say could have catastrophic effects.)

As wildfires worsen, so too does the public health crisis of smoke, even in places that never had to deal with the haze before. Governments now have to work diligently to protect their people, like improving access to air purifiers, especially in schools. “This is no longer an isolated or geographically confined issue,” Maassel said. “It’s really spreading globally and to places that have never experienced it before.”

More than 50 bushfires were burning across New South Wales on Monday, nine of them out of control, according to the RFS

A wildfire in California’s Joshua Tree National Park burned through some 29 hectares (72 acres) of land during the recent federal government shutdown in October and November. That’s a small fire by California standards, but firefighters estimate it scorched roughly 1,000 of the park’s iconic Joshua trees, according to The Los Angeles Times.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30973022

Scientists have long known that fires release substantial amounts of greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere.

However, estimating the total climate impact of fires is challenging.

Now, new satellite data has shed fresh light on the complex interplay between the climate and fires in different landscapes around the world.

It suggests that global emissions from fires are much higher than previously assumed.

In this article, we unpack the latest update to the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) – a resource that combines satellite information on fire activity and vegetation to estimate how fires impact the land and atmosphere.

The latest update to the database – explored in new research published in journal Scientific Data – includes data up to and including the year 2024.

It reveals that, once the data from smaller fires is included, fire emissions sit at roughly 3.4bn tonnes of carbon (GtC) annually – significantly higher than previous estimates.

It also shows that carbon emissions from fires have remained stable over the past two to three decades, as rising emissions from forest fires have been offset by a decline in grassland fire emissions.

The database update also illustrates how the amount of area burned around the world each year is falling as expanding agriculture has created a fragmented landscape and new restrictions on crop residue burning have come into force.

Landscape fires

Fire events vary widely in cause, size and intensity. They take place across the globe in many types of landscapes – deserts and ice sheets are the only biomes that are immune to fire.

When vegetation burns, it releases greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. It also releases pollutants that cause local air pollution and, on a global scale, have a cooling effect on the climate.

Forest fires often generate considerable media attention, especially when they threaten places where people live.

However, the forest fires that make the news represent just a small fraction of all fires globally.

More than 95% of the world’s burned area occurs in landscapes with few trees, such as savannahs and grasslands.

Fires have helped maintain tropical savannah ecosystems for millions of years. Savannahs have the perfect conditions for fire: a wet season which allows grasses and other “fuels” to grow, followed by an extended dry season where these fuels become flammable.

Historically, these fires were ignited by lightning. Today, they are mostly caused – intentionally or accidentally – by humans.

And yet, despite their prevalence, these fires receive relatively little media attention. This is not surprising, as they have been part of the landscape for so long and rarely threaten humans, except for their impact on air quality.

Fires also occur in croplands. For example, farmers may use fire to clear agricultural residues after harvest, or during deforestation to clear land for cultivation.

The term “landscape fires” is increasingly used to describe all fires that burn on land – both planned and unplanned.

(The term “wildfire”, on the other hand, covers a subset of landscape fires which are unplanned and typically burn in underdeveloped and underinhabited land.)

Calculating the carbon emissions of landscape fires is important to better understand their impact on local air quality and the global climate.

New data

In principle, calculating carbon emissions from fires is straightforward. The amount of vegetation consumed by fire – or “fuel consumption” – in one representative “unit” of burned area has to be multiplied by the total area burned.

Fuel consumption can be determined through field measurements and satellite analysis.

For example, the burned area of a relatively small fire can be measured by walking around the perimeter with a GPS device. Fuel consumption, meanwhile, can be derived by measuring the difference in amount of vegetation before and after a fire, something that is usually only feasible with planned fires.

In practice, however, fires are unpredictable and highly variable, making accurate measurement difficult.

To track where and when fires occur, researchers rely on satellite observations.

For two decades, NASA’s MODIS satellite sensors have provided a continuous, global record of fire activity. To avoid too many false alarms, the algorithms these satellites use are built in a way so fires are flagged only when they burn an entire 500-metre grid cell.

However, this approach misses many smaller fires – resulting in conservative estimates of total burned area.

The latest update to the GFED includes, for the first time, finer-resolution satellite data, including from the European Space Agency’s “sentinel missions”.

This data shows that fires too small to be picked up by a satellite with a 500-metre spatial resolution are extremely common. So common, in fact, that they nearly double previous estimates of global burned area.

The data shows that, on average, 800 hectares of land – an area roughly the size of Australia – has burned annually over the past two decades.

The map below shows the frequency of fires around the world. Regions shaded in dark red burn, on average, 50-100% each year. In other words, fires occur annually or biannually. Regions in dark blue, on the other hand, are those where fires occur, but are very infrequent. Most regions fall in between these extremes.

The map shows that the areas most prone to fire are largely found in the world’s savannah and agricultural regions.

Global distribution of the average burned area over 2002-22, expressed as a percentage of the land area in each 0.25 by 0.25 degree grid cell. Based on the GFED dataset. Credit: Chen et al. (2023)

Falling burned area

Over recent decades, the total burned area globally each year has been declining.

This is largely due to land-use change in regions which used to have frequent fires.

For example, savannah is being converted to croplands in Africa. This transforms a frequently burning land-use type to one that does not burn – and creates a more fragmented landscape with new firebreaks which limit the spread of fire.

The decline in burned area is also due to the introduction of more stringent air quality regulations limiting crop residue burning in much of the world, including the European Union.

The amount of “fuel” – or biomass – in a unit area of land varies greatly. Arid grasslands are biomass-poor and, therefore, produce less carbon emissions when burned, whereas fuel consumption in tropical forests with peat soils is extremely high.

Maps of carbon emissions from fires closely resemble maps of burned area. However, they typically highlight biomass-rich areas, such as dense forests.

This is illustrated in the map below, which shows how fires in regions coloured dark red on the map produce, on average, 1,000-5,000 grams of carbon per square metre. In these places, much more carbon is lost during fires than gained through photosynthesis.

Meanwhile, much of the world’s savannah regions are coloured in yellow and orange on the map, indicating that fires here produce between 100-500 grams of carbon per square metre.

Fire carbon emissions, in grams of carbon per square metre. Based on the GFED emissions dataset. Credit: Van der Werf et al. (2025)

Rising forest fire carbon emissions

The boost in fire emissions captured by the latest version of the GFED is most pronounced in open landscapes, including savannahs, grasslands and shrublands.

Forest fire emissions, on the other hand, have barely changed in the updated version of the database. This is because most forest fires are relatively large and were already well captured by the coarse resolution satellite data used previously.

However, the trend in forest fire emissions is sloping upwards over the study period.

Overall, current estimates – which take into account the new data from smaller fires – suggest that, over 2002-22, global fire emissions averaged 3.4GtC per year.

This is roughly 65% higher than estimates set out in the previous update to the GFED, which was published in 2017.

For comparison, today’s fossil fuel emissions are around 10GtC per year.

Comparisons between fire and fossil fuel carbon emissions are somewhat flawed, as much of the carbon released by fires is eventually reabsorbed when vegetation regrows.

However, this is not the case for fires linked to deforestation or the burning of tropical peatlands, where regrowth is either much slower – or non-existent, if forests are converted to agriculture. These fires account for roughly 0.4GtC each year – just less than 12% of total fire emissions – and contribute directly to the long-term rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).

The traditional view of forest fires as “carbon-neutral” is increasingly uncertain as the climate changes due to human activity. Longer fire seasons, drier vegetation and more lightning-induced ignitions are increasing fire frequency in many forested regions.

This is most apparent in the rapidly-warming boreal forests of the far-northern latitudes. The year 2023 saw the highest emissions ever recorded by satellites in boreal forests, breaking a record set just two years before.

Moreover, the fires in boreal forests are becoming more intense – meaning they burn hotter and consume a larger fraction of vegetation. This, in turn, jeopardises the recovery of forests.

In cold areas, fires also cause permafrost to break down faster. This happens because fires remove an organic soil layer that has an insulating effect which prevents permafrost thaw.

The map below shows the dominant fire type in different regions of the world, including boreal forest fires (dark green), cropland fires (red), open savannah (darker yellow) and woody savannah (brown).

Dominant fire type around the world, based on total carbon emissions. Cropland fires are in red, woody savannah in brown, open savannah in dark yellow, grassland and shrubland in light yellow, peatland in black, tropical forest in aquamarine, temperature forest in mid-green and boreal forest in dark green. Credit: GFED5

Changing ‘pyrogeography’

Thanks to more precise satellite data we now know that fire emissions are higher than we thought previously, with the new version of GFED having 65% higher overall fire emissions than its predecessor.

However, all evidence suggests that emissions from fires have been stable over the past two to three decades. This is because an increase in forest fire emissions is being offset by a decline in grassland fire emissions.

The world’s changing “pyrogeography” is illustrated in the bar chart below, which breaks down annual fire emissions across different types of biome.

It shows how low-intensity grassland fires with modest fuel consumption – represented in yellow and brown – have declined over time, while high-intensity forest fires – illustrated in green colours – are becoming more prominent, albeit with substantial variability in emissions year-on-year.

Annual emissions across various fire categories, where yellow-brown represents savannah and grassland, orange cropland, black peatland and various shades of green the different forest-fire types. Credit: GFED5

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29586153

• Brazil’s official data show deforestation in the Amazon fell 11% in the 12 months to July 2025, with independent monitoring by Imazon confirming a similar trend—evidence that policies under President Lula da Silva are reversing the sharp rise seen during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration.
• Even as land clearing slows, fires and forest degradation have become major drivers of loss. Exceptional drought in 2024, record heat, and the spread of roads and logging left large areas of the forest dry and flammable, causing 2.78 million hectares of primary forest loss—roughly 60% from fire.
• Burned areas have dropped by 45% over the past year, suggesting some recovery, yet scientists warn the Amazon is entering a more fragile state shaped by climate extremes and the lingering effects of past destruction.
• As Brazil prepares to host COP30 in Belém, attention will center on sustaining recent gains and advancing initiatives like the proposed $125 billion Tropical Forest Forever Facility, even as new roads, gold mining, and policy uncertainty—such as the wavering soy moratorium—continue to threaten progress.

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Spring temperatures in parts of Sydney neared 40C on Wednesday and hot, dry winds fanned dozens of bush and grass fires in New South Wales, prompting rare “red” wind warnings and wildfire emergencies across the Tasman in New Zealand.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29116390

Greenhouse gases from wildfires at sixth highest level on record after blazes in large areas of the Americas and Africa

Carbon emissions from extreme wildfires increased by 9% last year to reach the sixth highest level on record.

Intense fast-spreading fires devastated huge swathes of South America’s rainforests, dry forests and wetlands and decimated Canada’s northern forests, pushing up the levels of damaging greenhouse gases.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29115057

• A new study conducted by a group of 53 scientists from Brazil and other nationalities revealed that preserved forest areas are increasingly harmed by climate change in the Amazon, largely due to the rapid increase in extreme temperatures.
• Between 1981 and 2023, extreme temperatures in the Amazon have risen at double the global average rate, increasing by 0.5° Celsius (0.9° Fahrenheit) per decade. The largely preserved north-central Amazon, home to conservation units and Indigenous territories, registered a rise of more than 3.3°C (5.9°F) in maximum extreme temperatures in the period.
• According to the study, the scenario provokes dry periods that lead to increasing forest fires and large-scale tree and fauna mortality, while bearing negative impacts on human access to services and health.
• Meanwhile, the fast temperature increase also demonstrates that high-emitting nations bear a strong responsibility for the changes in the Amazon, underscoring the urgent need for emission reductions and internal adaptation to save preserved areas of the tropical biome.

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The expert witnessed that in a region that had already burned in 2015 — a particularly dry year, also marked by many wildfires — with the flames climbing up young trees, about 15 meters (50 feet) tall, which had grown after that previous fire, and leaping from one canopy to another.

As someone who studies fire behavior, the researcher had often found herself helping to contain flames throughout her years of fieldwork. “But that was the first time I ran. It was the first time I was truly afraid of the fire.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29014478

“Extreme” wildfires emitted more than 8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide during the 2024-25 “global fire season”, according to a new report.

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% 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% 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”.

In the report’s “summary for policymakers”, study author Dr Matthew Jones, from the University of East Anglia, says:

“[The report] focuses on the global extreme wildfire events of the global fire season, explains why they happened and fingerprints the role of climate change as one of the key drivers of changing wildfire risk globally.”

The authors aim to “deliver actionable information” to policy experts and wider society about wildfires, the report says.

Using satellite data, the authors find that 3.7m square kilometres (km2) of land burned globally between March 2024 and February 2025. This means that the 2024-25 fire season ranks 16th out of all fire seasons since 2002, indicating below-average burned area compared to the rest of the 21st century.

However, the global fire emissions database shows that the 2024-25 wildfire season drove more than 8bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the report. This is 10% above the average of wildfire seasons since 2002.

Jones explains that this is indicative of a trend towards “increasing extent and severity of fire in global forests, which are carbon-rich”, as opposed to less carbon-rich grassland biomes.

The chart below shows global burned area (top) and carbon emissions (bottom) during the 2024-25 wildfire season, compared to the average over 2002-24, for different world regions. Red bars indicate that the 2024-25 wildfire season had higher-than-average burned area or emissions for the given region, while blue indicates lower-than-average numbers.

Burned area, in thousands of km2 (top) and carbon emissions in teragrams (equivalent to millions of tonnes) of carbon (bottom) during the 2024-25 wildfire season, compared to the 2002-24 average, for different world regions and biomes. The triangles (right y-axis) indicate the percentage of the relative anomaly compared to the average. Source: Kelley et al. (2025)

Savannas, grasslands and shrublands account for more than 80% of the burned area in a typical year, with forests and croplands making up the rest.

According to the report, burned area in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannah and shrublands‬‭ was 10% below the 2002-24 average over 2024-25, but still contributed 70% towards the total global burned area.

The 2024-25 wildfire season was the second consecutive year that African‬‭ savannahs‬‭ “experienced‬‭ a‬‭ low‬‭ fire‬‭ season”, the report notes, with below average burned area and carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, the report finds that the greatest increases in burned area and carbon emissions during the 2024-25 wildfire season were seen in the ‭Canada’s boreal‬‭ forests‬‭, the‬‭ moist‬‭ tropical‬‭ forests‬‭ in‬‭ the Amazon region, the‬‭ Chiquitano‬‭ dry‬‭ forests‬‭ of‬‭ Bolivia and the Cerrado – a tropical savannah in central Brazil.

The graphic below shows some key figures from the 2024-25 wildfire season.

Key figures from the 2024-25 wildfire season. Source: State of wildfires project, summary for policymakers (2025).

Study author Dr Douglas Kelley, from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told a press briefing that the author team spent time “actively engaging with a big regional panel of experts”.

The team identified four “focal events” – extreme wildfire events that were chosen both for the severity of the fire and the impacts on people and the environment.

For each focal point, the study authors assessed the drivers of the wildfire. They also used attribution – a field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on an extreme event – to determine the contribution of human-caused climate change.

Finally, the authors estimated the likelihood of similar events occurring in the future as the climate continues to warm over the coming century.

Kelley told the press briefing that “capturing fires themselves can be quite tricky”, because they are affected by a range of different factors.

The report notes that wildfires are affected by changes in weather, with hot and dry weather providing the best conditions for wildfires. It adds that changes in land use are also important, as they can affect ignition.

Kelley explained that the report authors used “multiple types of attribution” to capture these different factors, using a range of fire models, weather forecasting models and land use data.

North America

In North America, 2024-25 was an “extreme” fire year, the report says.

Both burned area and carbon emissions reached their second-highest levels since records began in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Across the continent, the burned area was 35% higher than the average since 2002 and the carbon emissions were more than double the average emissions since 2003.

In Canada, 46,000km2 of land burned during the 2024-25 fire season, releasing 282m tonnes of carbon (Mt). The burned area was 85% higher than average, but the associated emissions were more than 200% higher than average, according to the report.

The report also notes that the wildfire season started early in Canada in 2024, due to earlier-than-normal snowmelt, as well as persistent, multiyear drought and “holdover fires” that reignited in the spring after smouldering through the winter months.

In the US, more than 64,000 individual wildfires contributed to a total burned area larger than 36,000km2. More than 8,000 wildfires in Mexico led to a record 16,500km2 of burned area.

The regions experiencing record or near-record burned area and carbon emissions were varied: from the Canadian tundra and the north-western US mountain ranges to California’s grasslands and Mexico’s tropical forests. In the far-northern boreal forest – which contains around 20% of the world’s forest carbon – the season trailed only the record-breaking 2023-24 fire season in burned area and associated emissions.

The researchers select the January 2025 southern California wildfires as one of the four “focal events” of the report.

The maps below show the locations of the four focal events: southern California, the Congo Basin, north-east Amazonia and the Pantanal-Chiquitano. The colours show the percentage difference from the average burned area, with blue indicating less burned area than average and darker browns showing more burned area.

The burned area anomaly, expressed as a percentage difference from the 2002-24 average, for each of four focal events (clockwise from top left): southern California, Congo Basin, Pantanal-Chiquitano and north-east Amazonia. The inset on each chart shows the location of the event. Blue colours indicate negative anomalies (less burned area than usual) and browns indicate positive anomalies. Source: Kelley et al. (2025)

In early January 2025, more than a dozen fires broke out in and around Los Angeles. Although January is “well outside the typical fire period”, the fires “became the most expensive wildfires ever recorded in just a few short days”, Prof Crystal Kolden – a study author and the director of the University of California, Merced’s Fire Resilience Center – wrote in the report.

The two largest fires, named the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, resulted in at least 30 deaths, more than 11,500 homes destroyed and more than 153,000 people being evacuated from their homes.

The fires resulted in estimated economic losses of $140bn, placing “substantial pressure on the already volatile home insurance market in California”, according to the report. It notes that the fires also contributed to the “housing and affordability crisis” in southern California.

The report says that the severity of the January fires was largely due to intensifying extremes in the water cycle – an unusually wet period that allowed vegetation to flourish, followed by an unusually arid winter that dried out that vegetation, turning it into fuel. It notes:

“Between 5 and 25 January, favourable weather, fuel availability and ignition sources aligned, leading to create ideal conditions for ignition and rapid fire spread.

“The substantial suppression efforts deployed is unaccounted for in our modelling framework and could be one of the possible reasons the fires did not escalate even further.”

Previous attribution analysis found that the January 2025 fires were “likely influenced” by human-driven climate change. The report authors also find that the burned area in the southern California event was 25 times greater due to climate change.

However, whether extreme fire activity in southern California continues to intensify depends largely on how the region’s plants and trees respond to increased atmospheric CO2, the report says. It also notes that climate models disagree as to whether wintertime rainfall will increase or decrease in future climates.

South America

The report finds that South America had a total area burned by wildfires of 120,000km2 during the 2024-25 fire season – 35% higher than average.

That translated into the release of 263Mt of carbon – the “highest carbon emissions on record for the continent” and 84% above average, the report says.

Jones, a study author, said in a press briefing that South America “hasn’t seen carbon emissions like this on record before”.

The report underlines that South America’s fire season was “unprecedented” in many ways, such as fire extent, emission levels, intensity and their impacts on society and the environment, although not in the number of fires.

For example, fires in the north-east Amazon impacted air quality, crops, houses and native vegetation, affecting people living in the region, including Indigenous peoples such as the Yanomami, the report says.

Laercio Fernandes, a volunteer firefighter and Indigenous man, holds a shell of a turtle found dead after a forest fire hit the Kadiwéu Indigenous land, in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, in 2024. Credit: Diego Cardoso / Alamy Stock Photo

The country with the largest area burned by wildfires during the 2024-25 fire season was Brazil, with a total burned area of 243,000km2, followed by Bolivia, with a total of 107,000km2 of burned area, and Venezuela, with a total of 43,000km2 of burned area.

The most-affected biomes in the region were the Amazon rainforest, with 47,000km2 of wildfires above the average since 2002.

Second was the Chiquitano and Chaco dry forests – encompassing parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. These biomes experienced a “record-breaking” fire season with more than 46,000km2 of burned area. These fires resulted in 100Mt of carbon emissions – six times higher than the average since 2003.

More than 46,000km2 of the Pantanal – the largest tropical wetland located in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay – burned in 2024-25, with associated carbon emissions of 67Mt above the average.

According to the report, fire activity in the region was primarily driven by “anomalous dry weather”.

In the north-eastern Amazon, the severity of the fire season between January and April 2024 was compounded by natural sources of climate variability, such as El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Mode, which contributed to very high temperatures and absence of rainfall. There, deep soil moisture dropped to 1%.

Meanwhile, in Pantanal and Chiquitano, “extreme dry weather” since 2023 and “multiple years of below-average rainfall” contributed to the severe fires, the report says. Study author Dr Francesca Di Giuseppe said in a briefing that the “wet season that usually happens between February and May failed completely to recharge the soil that kept completely dry and this drove most of the fire season” in the region.

The authors conduct an attribution analysis and find that the fire weather conditions in the north-eastern Amazon that season were “significantly more likely” due to climate change. In the Pantanal and Chiquitano, the conditions were 4.2-5.5 times more likely due to climate change.

Africa

Overall, the scale of fires across Africa was “well-below average” in 2024 and 2025, the report finds, except in certain areas, including the Congo Basin, northern Angola and South Africa.

In 2024, a record-high amount of land was burned in the Congo Basin – a biodiverse region in central Africa spanning six countries that holds the world’s second-largest tropical forest. This burned area was 28% higher than the annual average and there were 4,000 fires in total, 20% more than usual, in 2024.

Fires also caused “hazardous” air pollution and contributed to the Congo Basin’s highest loss of primary forest in a decade.

The analysis in the report finds that it is “virtually certain” that human-caused climate change contributed to the extreme fire weather in this region in July and August 2024.

The hot, dry and windy conditions were 3-8 times more likely to occur as a result of climate change and the area scorched by fires was three times greater than it would have been otherwise, the findings show.

Climate change has also driven an increase of more than 50% in the average annual burned area in the Congo Basin, which the researchers say is “one of the most robust signals of climate influence” in the fire trends they analysed.

Drought was a major factor behind the fires, the report finds, and water stress is expected to be the main driver shaping future fires in the Congo Basin.

Congo rainforest along Rembo Ngowe river in Akaka, Loango National Park, Gabon. Credit: Lee Dalton / Alamy Stock Photo.

These fires are “part of a long-term trend of increasing fire encroachment into African moist forests, driven by climate change and human pressure”, says Prof Michael Wimberly, a professor at the University of Oklahoma who was not involved in the report, but has researched wildfires in Africa. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The increased fire activity in the Congo Basin is troubling because of the vast expanses of unfragmented forests and peatlands that store massive amounts of carbon, provide habitat for threatened species and supply vital resources to local populations.”

The report notes that there is “sparse reporting and poor media coverage” on the impacts of fires in the Congo Basin in 2024, despite millions of people being impacted.

In South Africa, 34 people were killed and thousands of livestock and homes were destroyed in fires last year. In Ivory Coast, 23 people were killed and 50km2 of land was burned.

Dr Glynis Humphrey, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town, who was not involved in the study, adds that a below-average burned area across Africa “does not necessarily indicate a decline in fire risk or impact”. She tells Carbon Brief:

“In some ecosystems, fewer but more intense fires are being observed, which can still have severe ecological and atmospheric consequences.”

Using climate models, the researchers project that fires to the extent of those in the Congo Basin last year could occur up to 50% more often by 2100, under a medium-emissions pathway.

The region is also projected to see more increases in extreme wildfire risk by the end of this century. Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the central part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo could see some of the largest increases in burned area, which, the report estimates, could double or quadruple in some cases.

Humphrey notes that fire patterns are “shifting” in response to climate change, which is “leading to significant consequences for ecosystems that don’t typically burn – like the forests in the Congo Basin”. She tells Carbon Brief:

“This is of concern, as primary forests harbour critical biodiversity that supports ecosystem functioning and provide services to people…These forests are also sanctuaries for endangered species.”

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• A new Nature study projects wildfire smoke will cause 71,000 excess deaths annually in the U.S. by 2050, representing $608 billion in damages that exceed all other estimated climate costs combined.
• Researchers linked climate conditions to fire emissions, smoke concentrations and mortality using historical death records and satellite data, finding that approximately 41,000 annual deaths already occur from wildfire smoke.
• More than half of projected deaths occur in Eastern U.S. states due to population density and long-range smoke transport, with health impacts lasting up to three years after exposure.
• Even if nations dramatically cut emissions, more than 60,000 Americans will still likely die annually from wildfire smoke by 2050 because Earth’s climate system takes decades to respond to changes, making adaptation strategies like air filters and forest management critical despite their limitations.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28580655

In 2024, the Amazon Rainforest underwent its most devastating forest fire season in more than two decades. According to a new study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the fire-driven forest degradation released an estimated 791 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, a sevenfold increase compared with the previous two years.

The carbon emissions from fires in 2024 surpassed those from deforestation for the first time on record. Brazil was the largest contributor, accounting for 61% of these emissions, followed by Bolivia with 32%, the study found.

“The escalating fire occurrence, driven by climate change and unsustainable land use, threatens to push the Amazon towards a catastrophic tipping point,” the authors write. “Urgent, coordinated efforts are crucial to mitigate these drivers and to prevent irreversible ecosystem damage.”

The researchers estimated that the total emissions from deforestation and fire-driven degradation in the Amazon in 2024 was 1,416 million metric tons of CO2. This is higher than Japan’s CO2 emissions in 2022, which ranked fifth after China, the U.S., India and Russia.

The 2023-24 Amazon drought was one of the most severe in recent history, fueled by the El Niño phenomenon, which causes lower rainfall in the region. Water levels in the Amazon’s main rivers, including the Solimões, Negro and Madeira, dropped to their lowest in more than 120 years.

Human-driven climate change has in fact made the Amazon Rainforest nearly 30 times more prone to fire, the 2023-24 State of Wildfires report found.

However, most blazes in 2024 would have likely been started by humans engaging in arson. Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, previously told Mongabay contributor Lucas Berti that in 2024, the dry, flammable forest became an opportunity for those wanting to deforest illegally.

According to the new study, fires affected 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) of Amazon forest last year alone. The estimate is less than that of a Brazil-based government figure, which put the number at 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) in 2024 just for Brazil.

Facilitated by the large swaths of burned forest, deforestation in 2025 has also been rising after a historic drop of 31% from 2023 to 2024. Monthly deforestation data in Brazil showed an increase of 92% of deforestation in May compared with the same month in 2024. A midyear review suggested that deforestation alerts increased by 27% from January to June over the previous year.

“With a worsening of climate change and the greater fragility of forest cover, including primary cover, we are beginning to see a shift,” João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary for Brazil’s Environment Ministry, said in June 2025.

“The tropical forest, which is naturally immune to large fires due to its humidity, is suffering a huge impact from climate change, reducing its resistance to fires and becoming more vulnerable,” he added.

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A white-headed woodpecker stirs the dawn quiet, hammering at a patch of charred bark stretching 15 feet up the trunk of a ponderosa pine. The first streaks of sun light the tree’s green crown, sending beams across this grove of healthy conifers. The marks of the 2021 Dixie Fire are everywhere. Several blackened trees lie toppled among the pale blossoms of deer brush and the spikes of snow plants, their crimson faded to dusky coral.

Flames raged through neighboring forests, exploding the tops of trees, flinging sparks down the mountainside until, on August 4, 2021, the fire itself reached the valley below and Greenville, 90 miles north of Lake Oroville. It took less than 30 minutes to destroy a town of 1,000 residents. Yet this stand at Round Valley Reservoir survived.

Years earlier, U.S. Forest Service crews had removed the brush and smaller trees, reducing the most flammable vegetation. Then they set fires, burning what was left on the ground in slow-moving spurts of flame. When Dixie arrived, the same fire that melted cars and torched 800 homes hit this stand and dropped to the ground. Here Dixie was tame, a docile blaze meandering across the forest floor with only occasional licks up the trunks of trees, says Ryan Bauer, Plumas National Forest fuels manager for the past 18 years.

If only there had been more active forest management like this, laments Bauer. Instead of 100-acre patches, “if we had burned 10,000-acre patches, we’d have 10,000-acre patches of surviving forest. We just never did,” says Bauer, who recently retired and is now working with a nonprofit to adapt communities to fire.

Two-thirds of the Plumas National Forest has burned in the last seven years, an area twice the size of San Francisco Bay. The fires have sent smoke charging down the Feather River Canyon, across the Central Valley, and into the San Francisco Bay Area, turning the sky burnt orange. Each fire has taken a toll on the watershed that provides drinking water to over 27 million people in California. With every blaze, habitat for deer, bald eagles, and four of California’s 10 wolf packs hangs in the balance.

The rest of the Plumas Forest is still green but far too crowded, with trees six to seven times as dense as in the past, according to a 2022 study led by prominent fire scientist Malcolm North. As forests dry each summer, a process exacerbated by climate change, vegetation becomes vulnerable to the least spark, poised to rage into the catastrophic wildfires experts predict are inevitable without a dramatic increase in active forest management. If the Plumas burns, the 8,000 people who live in towns like Quincy, Graeagle, and Portola are in jeopardy—at risk of joining the thousands of us forced to evacuate Paradise, Greenville, and other Plumas communities destroyed by recent wildfires.

The forest also faces an existential risk, says Michael Hall, manager of the Feather River Resource Conservation District. Because forests in the Sierra Nevada have evolved with fire, they depend on its power to clear out overcrowded trees and let in nurturing bursts of sunlight, to spur new growth. Black-backed woodpeckers, morels, grasses, ferns, and wildflowers all rely on periodic wildfires. A century of fire suppression has stymied this natural succession, creating overcrowded and decadent stands that have fueled the recent sequence of megafires. If we don’t deal with the threat such fires pose, the soil and seed banks that replenish forests will be destroyed, the trees replaced by shrubs and snags, Hall says. Some ponderosa and red fir stands will convert to oak and brush. Without active management, those will burn, too. “And then we’ve lost a forest,” he says. It’s a nightmare scenario that has jolted Forest Service officials into action.

Urged on by scientists, the Forest Service, and other natural resource agencies, Plumas Forest officials have launched a plan for a dramatic change in forest management. To mount it, they are using chain saws, drip torches, and an array of gigantic machines that include masticators, feller bunchers, grapples, and hot saws. The goal is to thin, log, and intentionally burn what experts say are unnaturally fire-prone forests. If their work can stay ahead of stand-converting flames, they hope to leave a vast swath of trees resilient to future fires. The project, which targets 285,000 acres of forest, is called Plumas Community Protection, and Congress in 2023 gave the Forest Service $274 million to carry it out.

This plan is visionary and ambitious but untested in scale. Its success depends on rapid accomplishment by a bureaucracy seldom known to be nimble, and now in the hands of an administration that has laid off thousands of workers and frozen millions of dollars of federal funds.

Despite the high stakes, Forest Service officials have held few public meetings, refused to provide basic details of the project with reporters, and declined to review a summary of our findings. Bay Nature and The Plumas Sun reported largely without the help of federal officials, including public information officers who said they feared doing their jobs would end them. Instead, we interviewed 47 forest experts—agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community leaders—and mined public documents to piece together a picture of the Plumas Community Protection project so far.

These interviews have made clear that the funding, unimaginable five years ago, has been largely spent or obligated. Yet little on-the-ground work has been accomplished in the woods. The plan is already foundering.

Hail Mary plan

Almost all of us who live in Plumas County can recite the recent fire sequence in chronological order starting in 2017: the Minerva, Camp, Walker, North Complex, Dixie, Beckwourth Complex, Park. . . . Each name triggers a wave of anxiety. It was the 2021 Dixie Fire that delivered the harshest blow, devastating the communities of Canyon Dam, Greenville, Indian Falls, and Warner Valley as it roared up the Feather River Canyon and on through Lassen Volcanic National Park to Hat Creek. When high winds relented and crews quelled the flames that October, the Dixie Fire had burned nearly one million acres in California’s largest single fire in recorded history. For those who evacuated, who lost homes, offices, and entire businesses, time is forever divided into before and after, pre-fire and post.

In the months that followed, stunned Plumas Forest officials grappled with an uncomfortable reality. For decades they had been marking trees to cut, administering timber sales that met the board-footage targets set by officials in Washington, D.C., and putting out every fire they could. By the 1990s, they had realized this management was contributing to larger and more intense wildfires. In response, they had developed a network of fuel breaks—modest linear patches cleared of vegetation—to slow the spread of fire.

Reporting by Tanvi Dutta Gupta / Illustration by Kelly Murphy

The patch near Round Valley was among the few successful fuel breaks on the Plumas Forest. The Dixie Fire overwhelmed most of the others, along with a handful of related projects. “They just got bowled over by this fire that was happening at this scale we’d never seen before,” says Angela Avery, executive director of Sierra Nevada Conservancy, a state-funded conservation organization. The horrendous damage Dixie caused made it clear that nothing was working to protect the Plumas Forest and its rural communities. “We threw everything we had at that fire but there was nothing we could do to stop it,” says Bauer, the former Plumas National Forest fuels manager.

Bauer, a 1994 graduate of Portola High School in eastern Plumas County, first became intrigued by the role of fire in forest ecosystems in a high school forestry class. Returning fire to landscapes that evolved with it has been his focus during most of his 31-year Forest Service career. As the Dixie smoke settled, Bauer saw an opportunity. He began to develop new plans with regional Fire Safe Councils and community wildfire preparedness groups. They focused on the towns within the Plumas Forest that wildfire had not yet burned. Their plans were aimed at making communities safer and forest stands more resilient to drought, insects, and other climate-driven disturbances. Community protection was the first priority, forest resilience the second. Ideas included up to mile-wide buffer zones around every area where communities bumped up against forests, known as the wildland urban interface (WUI).

Bauer’s back-of-the-napkin strategies evolved into the plans that formed the management basis for the community protection plan. The long-term goal is preparing these unburned forests for future fires to amble along the forest floor, clearing out the vegetation that can build into stand-destroying wildfires. The plans expand WUI buffer areas and significantly increase the acreage designated for thinning and logging. Crucially, the plans emphasize the importance of intentional fires set routinely throughout the forest. No thinning, no commercial logging project is complete until the acreage has been intentionally burned, Bauer says.

Bauer and his Fire Safe colleagues mapped 300,000 acres where dense brush and overcrowded trees posed a hazard to communities and natural resources. Forest officials launched biological, archaeological, and watershed surveys and started to streamline the environmental analyses they would eventually need. Forest planners often work ahead of funding, but this was a 300,000-acre plan with no assurance of approval or money. “It was a bit of a Hail Mary,” Bauer says. “We take risks sometimes, but mostly safer than this one.” This Hail Mary aimed to save 41 rural communities and the national forest in the immediate path of a potential wildfire all too real in the post-Dixie world.

A whopping $274 million

The ferocity of the Dixie and other megafires in 2020 and 2021 shocked Forest Service officials in Washington, D.C. In 2022, they announced a wildfire crisis strategy designating 45 million acres, mostly in the West, for attention as particularly high-risk “firesheds.” Congress allocated $3.2 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to make them safer. In January 2023, the agency added the Plumas National Forest’s 285,000 acres to the strategy. The astonishing $273,930,000 investment underscored the urgency felt from Quincy to the nation’s capital. The Plumas Forest funding is about 20 percent of the $1.4 billion in federal BIL and IRA spending for nature in Northern California that Bay Nature has tracked in its Wild Billions reporting project, and it is the largest single allocation by far.

A commitment to forest health in such a large landscape with that level of funding is monumental, says Chris Daunt, a Portola resident with the Mule Deer Foundation, which received $14 million for on-the-ground treatments—“a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Work quickly shifted to identifying specific geographic areas to begin the thinning and logging that would prepare the way for beneficial fires that protect communities. Some work already begun around Quincy, the county seat, was rolled into the Community Protection project. The next priority became Portola, Graeagle, and a string of small towns along Highway 70, where planning was already underway. Forest officials allocated $85 million from the federal fund to Sierra Tahoe Environmental Management, a logging company based in Loyalton formed around the time the well-funded Plumas plan was announced. STEM is tasked with removing hazardous trees across 70,000 acres, selecting those large enough to log for commercial sale, and eventually applying intentional fire. The nonprofit Missoula, Montana–based National Forest Foundation (NFF) was allocated $98 million to complete similar work on 70,000 acres in the valley surrounding Quincy and Mohawk Valley to the east.

Bigger, faster

The sheer size of the Plumas Forest projects is unprecedented. The two 70,000-acre projects are each more than seven times bigger than most previous Plumas contracts and on a much larger scale than has been done in California. It’s the level we need to be working toward, says Jason Moghaddas, a Quincy-based forester, fire ecologist, and geographic analyst who is familiar with the Plumas National Forest.

Size is actually the point, says Avery of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy. Motivated by how much bigger fires have gotten, the Conservancy has invested in landscape-scale projects. “If a megafire or a million-acre fire comes through, we have more opportunity to stand against it, for the treatments to work,” she says. Bauer and other Plumas Forest officials planned thinning projects that leaped from 5,000 acres to 50,000 and prescribed burns that would cover most of the Plumas Community Protection landscape.

The urgency of imminent wildfire caused the Plumas Forest officials to pare down the environmental analyses required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead of conducting full environmental impact statements, with scrutiny of cumulative impacts and years-long public comment periods, officials used less rigorous environmental assessments. Work on at least 70,000 acres was fast-tracked under emergency declarations, which eliminate public objections. NEPA processes that would normally take as long as seven years took an average of about 20 months.

This tack brought a few critics—most significantly, two environmental groups that sued the Forest Service for failing to take a “more than perfunctory” look at environmental consequences. Plumas National Forest officials temporarily withdrew their approval for treating more than half the target landscape’s area—delaying implementation for over a year to revise their environmental analysis. It was just released July 1.

But nearly all of the 47 people interviewed argued that cutting procedural corners is justified by the looming threat of disastrous fire. The challenge is, “can we work fast enough and do the work well enough to stave off some of the catastrophic outcomes we are seeing,” says Jonathan Kusel, executive director of the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, whose organization has helped with environmental reviews for the Plumas Forest.

Recent science supports both the size and urgency of the Plumas projects, according to Scott Stephens, professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Some are calling for even more work on even larger landscapes. “If anything, the Plumas Community Protection project doesn’t treat enough acres,” Hall wrote with others in a published commentary.

What’s done

Driving around Plumas County, where the federal government manages 90 percent of the land, roads seem to go through one mile of green forest for every two miles of charred stands, their specters sometimes reaching to the horizon. Halfway between Quincy and the remote mining town of La Porte, a green forest of red fir and butterscotch-scented Jeffrey pines plunges down the mountain to the Middle Fork of the Feather River. Only the high-pitched call of a Townsend’s solitaire interrupts the muffled cascade a thousand feet below. Sugar pines dangle their foot-long cones on surrounding slopes so thick with seedlings and saplings a California black bear would be challenged to forage among them.

This is some of the unnaturally dense forest slated for thinning, logging, and intentional burning. Two years after Congress approved the $274 million, work in the woods has been slow to advance. Progress toward the goal of treating 74,000 acres in 2023, with a total of 185,000 acres in subsequent years, is incremental.

Some work has been done. In areas around Quincy and Meadow Valley, and near communities along Highway 70 toward Portola, mastication machines have been chewing brush and small trees into wood chips and spitting them back onto the landscape. Crews are also using chain saws and other machines to thin forests. These are steps preliminary to commercial logging, which has not started.

The Forest Service’s annual reports say 49,496 acres of Plumas Forest were treated in 2023 and 5,400 acres in 2024, about one-fifth of the goal. But it’s unclear how much safer the forest is. The reports do not say whether the treatment was thinning, logging, or intentional burning, nor where the activity occurred. Scientists and forest managers across the West have been debating for years how to measure forest resilience and community protection. Acreage is not reliable, says Bauer. A better measure would count an acre as treated when all the on-the-ground work is done, says Eric Edwards, whose research at UC Davis focuses on environmental and agricultural economics.

For all the wildfire crisis strategy’s hype of intentional burning and its protective benefits for both forests and communities, the Plumas plan is vague on acreage goals and enforcing the contractors’ burn objectives. It identifies all 285,000 acres for intentional fire, says Bauer. But unlike with thinning and logging, operators are not tied to burn goals. “It’s always a soft commitment,” Bauer says. Plumas Forest officials have reported 2,543 acres burned since October. Almost all of it was burning piles of branches and brush, not the essential low-intensity intentional fires that sweep across the forest floor. Those intentional broadcast burns total about 2,500 acres, Bay Nature and The Plumas Sun estimate, using Forest Service data with help from experts. That’s just under 1 percent of the target landscape.

In reports on the nationwide wildfire crisis strategy, the Forest Service has cited challenges to implementation, including inflated costs, a lack of timber market for small-diameter wood, employee housing costs, uncompetitive pay, and limited on-the-ground capacity.

Little of the information about progress on the Plumas Community Protection projects has come from Plumas Forest officials, who have given short shrift to reporters’ questions since late January. Calls to the Plumas Forest supervisor’s office have gone unreturned, sometimes careening in bizarre redirects that include a scratchy recording of the Smokey Bear song. Reporters’ written questions, submitted in February to the Forest Service’s public affairs office in Washington, D.C., have gone unanswered. The Trump administration has blocked press access to agency scientists and taken down the interactive map that once documented project progress. The only interview granted since late January was a half hour, in August, on how to use agency data. Links to websites available in January now post “page not found” or, more cynically, “Looks like you hit the end of the trail.”

Some Plumas residents say the Forest Service has shirked its obligation to keep the public informed. John Sheehan, who has paid close attention to Plumas National Forest issues since 1992, was dismayed by knowing “next to nothing” about the Community Protection plan, he says. “When the government’s going to do something this big and this close to communities, it needs to be in touch with the people affected. The Plumas Forest just isn’t.” Josh Hart, a spokesperson for Feather River Action!, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed by environmental groups, complains about the dearth of public information for “the most significant plans for the Plumas National Forest ever in history.”

The agency has provided no accounting of how it has spent the $274 million. Public records and interviews with contractors reveal that around $202 million has been allocated in contracts for thinning and logging. Another $5 million went to prescribed burning, Bauer says. The Great Basin Institute received approximately $2 million for wildlife surveys. Approximately $50 million went to environmental analyses. That leaves $15 million unaccounted for. Some went directly to salaries, says Bauer. Most of the rest likely went to planning, he says. “That funding source is gone.”

The agency acknowledged in a 2025 national report that it had run through most of its BIL and IRA money. “Fully realizing the vision laid out by the Wildfire Crisis Strategy will require further, sustained investments,” the report says.

Hamstrung

Two full years since the launch of the Plumas Community Protection plan, the Plumas Forest’s hamstrung capacity raises questions about its ability to execute its own plan. Recent Trump administration layoffs cap years of reduced staffing. The Plumas Forest supervisor position was vacant for over a year. A merry-go-round of vacancies and short-term appointments often leaves partners and contractors in limbo, waiting for decisions to allow their work to proceed, says Jim Wilcox, a Plumas Corporation senior adviser who has worked on Forest Service restoration contracts for 35 years. “The delays drive everyone crazy.”

Other agencies and private companies are filling some of the gaps, which is part of the national strategy to address the wildfire crisis. They have done most of the required environmental analyses and are slated for much of the on-the-ground project work. The Forest Service has always used non-agency partners to do logging and burning, Moghaddas says, but with giant 70,000-acre units, the partnerships are larger and more complex. “The Forest Service can’t do it alone,” he says. Avery calls it a cultural shift: “I have seen an evolution in the Forest Service’s willingness to work with partners, which I thought was a good thing in response to a tragedy.”

The shift away from federal oversight of national forest land, though, worries Hall. Forest Service crews have generally been composed of people who care about protecting and preserving public lands, he says. “I love the idea of public land and having so much of it available . . . If we don’t have someone obligated to steward it—and that’s the Forest Service folks—we’re all in trouble.”

While STEM is a company of experienced loggers and NFF has demonstrated dedication to national forest health, these are new ventures for each organization. Ivy Kostick, NFF’s forester for the 70,000-acre project, is breaking it down into manageable pieces, she says: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time?”

Moment of opportunity

Now, four years after the Dixie Fire, the ambitious Plumas Community Protection plan is still more promise than on-the-ground reality. Because funding has already been obligated, the major work should eventually proceed, says Jake Blaufuss, a lifelong local and Quincy-based forester for American Forest Resource Council, a trade association that advocates for sustainable forests. Commercial logging will generate revenue that can be reinvested in prescribed burning and other remaining work, Blaufuss says. Jeff Holland, a spokesperson for STEM, says 2026 will bring enough activity “where people will actually see the difference.”

For Bauer, the plan’s $274 million bought something essential: environmental analyses. While the Forest Service provided no financial details, partners close to the project confirmed that some of the federal funds went to the biological surveys, stream assessments, archaeological reviews, and timber stand counts required under NEPA. Today, most of the Plumas Community Protection landscape is covered by an approved plan. While currently there’s not a lot of actual activity, when it begins, Blaufuss says, these documents will “allow the Forest Service to be nimble.”

Bauer measures the scale of success by the scale of prescribed fire. The goal for both forest resilience and community protection is to follow thinning and logging with burning; it is the goal for the Plumas Community Protection project. What haunts Bauer are the places around Greenville where pre-Dixie plans called for aggressive thinning followed by prescribed fire. Most never saw a chain saw or a drip torch, and most were totally incinerated when Dixie blazed through. “We just didn’t get to them,” Bauer says. If the Plumas Community Protection project does not complete the plan for prescribed burning, “it’s essentially a roulette scenario,” he says. And so far it hasn’t.

What the plan has done is to advance the understanding that fire is essential for forest resilience and community safety. Forest managers are thinking creatively about how to achieve that. The conversation about forest management is shifting.

Fire rejuvenates forest ecosystems. While the Dixie Fire’s toll on the Plumas and its communities has been horrific, it leaves them poised for renewal—like silver lupines waiting in the seed bank to burst into flower. If the Plumas Forest project can gain additional funding and muster sufficient political will, the grand plan to protect all that did not burn may advance. “We know we need wholesale change in the way we’re managing the forest,” says Blaufuss. “This is our chance.”

Tanvi Dutta Gupta and Anushuya Thapa contributed reporting. This article was supported by the March Conservation Fund.

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Results: From 1992 to 2024, in all 8 contiguous-US Forest Service regions combined, wildfire-ignition density was lowest in designated wilderness areas (1.7 fires/1,000 hectares), followed closely by that in Inventoried Roadless Areas (1.9 fires/1,000 ha). The highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands within 50 meters of roads (7.4 fires/1,000 ha), and the second highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands outside of the 100-m road buffers, but not in wilderness or roadless areas (3.5 fires/1,000 ha).

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28453543

Of 200 fires in the past 44 years, half of the fires that cost US$1bn or more were in the last decade

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27148007

As of 1st September, around 380,000 hectares (ha) have burned across Spain since the start of the year, according to the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24823982

• A new and alarming pattern of destruction is emerging in the rainforest, challenging Brazilian authorities ahead of COP30.
• After plunging in 2023 and 2024, deforestation in the Amazon surged 92% in May and is up 27% in 2025, half of it in recently burned land — an all-time high.
• The biome’s increased susceptibility to fire makes it a more attractive and less risky method for criminals seeking illegal deforestation, according to experts.
• This dramatic increase in forest loss presents a major challenge for Brazil’s government, which aims to lead conservation talks, ahead of COP30, in November.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27811429

Utah laws cap wildfire damages and let utilities pass the cost onto customers. Utility lobbyists are pushing the model in other states.

[...]

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23489960

• Recent data from the University of Maryland show the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of primary rainforest in 2024 — nearly double the loss of 2023 and the highest on record.
• Six Latin American countries were in the top 10 nations for primary tropical forest loss.
• In the Amazon, forest loss more than doubled from 2023 to 2024, with more than half the result of wildfires. Other key drivers include agricultural expansion and criminal networks that increasingly threaten the region through gold mining, drug trafficking and other illicit activities.
• Fire was the leading driver of forest loss (49.5%), destroying 2.84 million hectares (7 million acres) of forest cover in Brazil, Bolivia and Mexico alone.

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