Which parts of the world are becoming more prone to wildfires?

Summary
Two maps explain why fire seasons are lasting longer and becoming more dangerousPLENTY OF HUMAN errors helped make this month’s wildfires in Los Angeles County so destructive. Poor urban development and regulations on insurance companies encouraged the region’s vast population to sprawl out into fire-prone areas, often in old homes built with flammable materials. In the background, though, climate change has been steadily ratcheting up the risks. Around the world, people must prepare for a future in which disastrous fires happen more frequently.
There are various ways in which wildfires are influenced by the climate. The biggest blazes tend to be preceded by heavy rainfall (which encourages the growth of vegetation) followed by prolonged dry spells (which, along with high temperatures, dry out the extra vegetation and turn it into tinder). Los Angeles had unusually heavy rain throughout 2022 and 2023, and has had practically none at all since the summer of 2024. Both extremes are typical of conditions amplified by greenhouse-gas warming.
Hotter air holds more moisture, which means that rainfall can be heavier, or increased evaporation can exacerbate droughts. One study has found that instances of this “hydroclimate whiplash" around the world have increased by at least a third since the mid-20th century.

Wildfires tend to break out in the warmer, drier summer months. Thus fire seasons are longer in regions close to the equator (see map 1). But hotter global temperatures mean that the summer season is starting earlier and ending later everywhere. A study published in 2022 found that, between 1979 and 2019, wildfire seasons globally lengthened by 27%. That resulted in an additional 14 days in the 2019 fire season compared with 40 years earlier.
Climate change is also increasing the frequency of the worst “fire weather" within a season—the hot, dry, windy conditions in which sparks are most likely to catch and spread. Between 1979 and 2019 the number of days with the most extreme fire weather globally increased by 54% (see map 2).

High-latitude boreal forests are seeing some of the most dramatic changes. These forests tend to store vast amounts of carbon. As a result, studies have found that fires in these areas produce much more carbon emissions than other regions. This could create a troubling feedback loop: more fires drive more global warming, which in turn drives yet more fires. (It should be noted, however, that the emissions produced by fires are a tiny fraction of what is produced by fossil fuels.)
The blazes in Los Angeles are generating pointed questions about what the state and city governments could have done to prevent them, and how they could have responded more effectively once they broke out. They highlight, too, the importance of slashing emissions quickly to minimise further warming. But they also raise more uncomfortable questions about how, and why, many places seem so unprepared for a more dangerous reality that is already here.