How big were wildfires in 2024?
Global burned area was about average, but it was a big year for South America.
The final article in this three-part series on 2024 summaries — the first two were on food production and deaths from disasters — will look at wildfires.
For this, I’ll rely on data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), a joint initiative of the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and Copernicus. GWIS detects wildfires using satellite imagery.1
My colleague Veronika Samborska and I built a page on Our World in Data, which is updated with the latest GWIS data weekly to allow people to easily track the extent of wildfires across the year.
It was a fairly average year for global wildfire burned area
Globally consistent data from GWIS only goes back to 2012. Based on this time series, 2024 was a pretty average year for the area of wildfire burn.
The chart below shows the evolution of the area burned by week, stretching from the first week of the year on the left to the final on the right. 2024 is highlighted in red.
As you can see, by the end of the year, the cumulative area burned was almost exactly in line with the average based on data from 2012.
Here’s the same data, but shown simply as the total for each year. 2018 was the lowest year in this record, with 2022 in second, then 2013 and 2024 coming in third lowest.
But look beneath the global total, and regional trends tell a more mixed story. In the chart below you can see the same time series for the six regions.
While it was a relatively average – or rather, below average – year for most regions, including North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, it was a large year for South America. Its area burned was the highest since these records began (although they don’t go very far back in time). We’ll look at the breakdown in specific countries in South America soon.
It’s important to note how much the global trend is dictated by wildfire burn in Africa. Look at the y-axis scales on the chart below. Africa consistently has more than 200 million hectares of burn; most regions have well under 50 million.
Around two-thirds of burn happens in Africa in most years, which means a low or high year in Africa tends to be mirrored in the global figure.
If you follow this newsletter closely, you might remember that back in August, I thought it was likely that it was going to be a big year for global wildfires. This was based on large fires in Africa. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, for reasons I’ll explain below (in the section on Africa).
If you’re only interested in a brief overview of global wildfires, you can probably stop here. In summary: it was a relatively low year for global wildfire burn, but is was a big year for fires in South America.
I’m now going to zoom in on some country trends in each region.
South America
Just as global wildfire trends are often a reflection of what’s going on in Africa, South American trends are dominated by the trend in Brazil.
It was a large year for Brazil – the highest in the series from 2012 onwards. In the chart below, I’ve shown the trends for a small selection of countries (I can’t include every country on a handful of charts, but you can explore this data for any country here).
It was also a relatively high year in Ecuador, and Peru. But the stand-out was Bolivia, where the area burned this year was about double what we’d expect from previous years. Canada was the 2023 outlier; in 2024, it was Bolivia.
North America
North American wildfire trends are dominated by the United States and Canada.
Stepping back to look at the data makes it so clear how crazy Canada’s wildfires were in 2023. 2024 was another high year, although that might still have felt like a relief compared to the record-breaking fires the previous year. The area burned last year was just one-third of the burn in 2023.
It was a low year for area burned in the US; in fact, it was the lowest since the start of 2012 records.
Europe
It was a fairly quiet year in Europe. I’ve shown just a selection of countries below, but most countries had wildfire burn below average. Portugal is one exception, which had its largest year since 2017.
Africa
Back in August I published an article looking at the latest data on wildfires. The global trend was looking bad and it was almost entirely down to one or two weeks of large wildfire outbreaks in Africa; specifically, Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Congo.
This data continued to be updated and republished weekly by GWIS – with the same increase in Africa – for some time. But, this turned out to be a technical error in the satellite data collection from this handful of countries. The actual area burned was much lower; good news for the world (although bad news for my earlier post, which I’ll add a warning disclaimer to).
The area burned in most African countries was average, or below average, last year. A much higher percentage of Africa’s burned area is the result of deliberate savannah burning and clearance compared to other regions.
Asia
I rarely hear much about wildfires in Asia in the news, so I had no idea what to expect from the data.
There isn’t a lot to note: the area burned in 2024 was pretty standard for the region as a whole, and I couldn’t find any outliers where it was an exceptional year.
Oceania
When we talk about Oceania in terms of wildfires, we’re basically talking about Australia. See the comparison of the two time series below.
2024 was not a particularly notable year; pretty standard, but following a series of large wildfires in 2023.
Total burned area doesn’t tell us everything
Here I’ve focused on just one metric: the total amount of area burned by wildfires. Of course, this doesn’t tell us everything.
Even if the total area burned of a given country hasn’t changed much over time, the pattern of fires in different regions within the country can.
And when it comes to human impacts from wildfires – the threat to human life (both in terms of direct contact with fires, and air pollution) and the damages from lost homes, infrastructure, farmland – the distribution of wildfires can matter a lot more than the total area burned. A fire half the size can do a lot more damage if it breaks out in a highly-populated area.
Total burned area gives us a birds-eye view of how much of the world has been burning in any given year. But to protect homes and save lives, fire dynamics and risks still need to be evaluated at a local level.
Since GWIS can sometimes retrospectively amend records better than improved data, I should make clear that this is based on the latest release by 24th February 2025.
It would be great if you could devote a column to how much CO2 reduction and how much fossil fuel consumption has been reduced by $3.5 trillion in spending on solar and wind over the past 20 years? Hoping for big numbers to make it all worthwhile.
This is a great data review! It's also helpful (but sad) to put context on the human experience we've had the past few years. To your point at the end of the article, it's hard to wrap our arms around the home loss / intra-country changes year-to-year. This year in the US, we obviously had devastating fires in LA, while last year, where I live in Chicago, we experienced a whole summer covered in smoke from the 2023 wildfire year in Canada. Good to remember that we're living through this data!