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Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters.

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Fig. 1: Distribution and trends of the most extreme wildfires on Earth.
Fig. 2: Patterns in extreme wildfire events among biogeographical realms and biomes.

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Data availability

MODIS active fire records used in the analysis were downloaded from the University of Maryland ftp server (sftp://fuoco.geog.umd.edu) and are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25132151 (ref. 53). Biomes of the world were downloaded from https://ecoregions.appspot.com/.

Code availability

Code for the analysis is available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25687113 (ref. 54).

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by the Australian Research Council (FL220100099) to D.M.J.S.B. We acknowledge the use of data from the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS; https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms), part of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) of NASA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fire Centre, School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Calum X. Cunningham, Grant J. Williamson & David M. J. S. Bowman

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Contributions

C.X.C.: formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, and writing—original draft, review and editing. G.J.W.: conceptualization, methodology, and writing—review and editing. D.M.J.S.B.: conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, supervision, and writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Calum X. Cunningham.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Evan Ellicott and Helen Poulos for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Global distribution of extreme wildfire events in each year from 2003 to 2023.

Points show the locations of energetically extreme events in each year (≥ 99.99th percentile).

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Cunningham, C.X., Williamson, G.J. & Bowman, D.M.J.S. Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02452-2

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