Why wildfires are getting more dangerous

After more than a year of record-breaking heat, the peak of fire season is approaching across vast swathes of our green planet.

Lots of ecosystems have evolved to withstand regular fires and some are even nourished by it – there are, for example, plants that need flames to help them reproduce. However, rising global temperatures have spawned entirely new fire regimes. Not only does this make life more hazardous, it is also making climate change worse.

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“It feels like we are getting used to the Earth being on fire,” say Víctor Fernández García and Cristina Santín, wildfire ecologists at Université de Lausanne and Swansea University respectively. According to their new research, this is a fairly recent phenomenon: extreme wildfires, the kind that killed more than 130 people in Chile earlier in 2024, happen twice as often and are doubly destructive compared with two decades ago.

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