Earth just endured one of its most extreme wildfire years on record — and scientists say human-driven climate change is the cause.
A sweeping new analysis, the State of Wildfires 2024–25 report, finds that human-driven global warming dramatically increased the intensity and scale of wildfires across the globe, in some regions making severe fire seasons 25 to 35 times more likely than they would have been in a cooler world.
The international study combines satellite data, weather reanalysis and land-surface models to show how heat, drought and vegetation changes converged into record-breaking fires from the Amazon to California.
