Wildfires

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A wildfire is an uncontrolled burn of vegetation, which includes the burning of forests, shrublands and grasslands, savannas, and croplands.

Wildfires can be caused by human activity — such as arson, unattended fires, or the loss of control of planned burns — and natural causes, such as lightning.

The spread of wildfires, once ignited, is determined by a range of factors, such as the amount and types of dry vegetation in the surrounding area, wind direction and speed, moisture levels, and heat. The amount of area burned by wildfires — and the impacts on ecosystems — is driven by a combination of weather patterns, human activity, the management of vegetation and landscapes, and responses to suppress their spread.

Humans are affected by wildfires both directly and indirectly. In most years, several hundred people die directly from the fire. Far more — typically tens or hundreds of thousands are evacuated, or in some cases, permanently displaced from their homes. Wildfires also emit particulates and local air pollutants that are damaging to human health. These fires also emit carbon dioxide — a drive of climate change — and can disrupt or damage ecosystems.

On this page, we look at data on wildfires' extent and how they are changing over time.

This data is updated frequently, including some charts on a weekly basis.

See all interactive charts on wildfires ↓

Tracking the extent of wildfires across the world
To track the progression of wildfires over the course of the current year and understand the historical trends in these fires, we’ve published a range of charts that we will update frequently.

Most of this data is sourced from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). This is a joint initiative of the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and Copernicus, the Earth observation component of the European Union’s space program.

GWIS detects wildfires through the use of satellite imagery1 and provides excellent, up-to-date reports on wildfire extent, emissions, and pollution at a very high resolution. Here, we visualize its national, regional, and global summaries. Detailed mappings of active wildfires are also available on its website.

Weekly burned area
A useful way of tracking the evolution of wildfires across the year is to look at their week-by-week progression. This allows us to compare the extent of wildfires at a given time this year to the same period in a previous year.

It lets us see whether wildfires have started earlier or later than in previous years and whether they’re tracking above or below what we might expect from historical records.

In the chart below, you can see the cumulative area of land burned by wildfires by week. The horizontal axis starts on week 1 (January 1st) and continues to 52 (the last week of December). Each line represents one year and shows the cumulative area burnt by any given week in that year.

You can explore this data for any country in the interactive chart. What you’ll find is that wildfires start at different times depending on the region. Peak wildfire season in Europe, for example, tends to be from June to August. In Southern Australia, it tends to be later in the year, coinciding with the South Hemisphere’s spring and summer months. You can also explore this data expressed as a share of the total land area.