The numbers should tell a reassuring story. In 2025, wildfires burned 335 million hectares worldwide — 16 percent below the long-term average, the second-lowest total since 2002. Carbon emissions from fires fell to their third-lowest level in more than two decades.
Instead, 2025 became the most expensive wildfire year in recorded history.
Insured wildfire losses accounted for 38 percent of all insured natural hazard losses globally — the highest share ever recorded. A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, led by researchers at the University of East Anglia, explains why: the world has entered a new era of fire, one where size no longer predicts destruction.
“We are seeing a growing disconnect between total area burned and real-world impacts,” said Matthew Jones, a physical geographer at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, who led the study. “Risk is increasingly determined by fire location, intensity, and exposure.”
The shift reflects a structural change in where and how fires burn. Savannah fires — historically responsible for large burned areas in Africa and South America — are declining. In their place, extreme wildfires are intensifying across temperate and high-latitude regions: North America, Europe, and East Asia, where dense forests, drought, and growing development at the wildland-urban boundary create the conditions for catastrophic loss.
“Not all fires are equal,” Jones said. “Small fires can have big effects on human health, the economy, and the climate.”
Los Angeles; Costliest Fire in US History
In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires swept through the Los Angeles area, killing 31 people, destroying nearly 12,000 homes, and forcing more than 150,000 residents to evacuate. Hazardous air pollution blanketed 10 million residents.
The fires caused $40 billion in insured losses and $140 billion in total losses — making them the costliest wildfires ever recorded and the fifth most expensive natural disaster in history by insured losses.
Crystal Kolden, a wildfire scientist at the University of California, Merced, and a co-author of the study, said the fires illustrated a pattern that has accelerated over the past decade. “We get a high density of loss in a pretty small area,” she said. “These fires, which weren’t at all gigantic, remind us that area burned is not necessarily the most important variable. Even small fires can have catastrophic consequences.”
Canada’s Forests
While the LA fires drove the economic toll, Canada’s boreal forests added a different dimension to 2025’s fire record.
Canadian wildfires entered their third consecutive year of extreme activity. Between 2023 and 2025, they released more carbon dioxide than in the entire preceding 15-year period. In 2025, the most intense burning centred on Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.
These forests were historically adapted to infrequent fires. They are now burning with unprecedented regularity, raising long-term concerns about ecosystem degradation, weakened forest recovery, and permanent carbon loss.
“Deadly human-caused wildfires in California, Europe, and South Korea in the same year as the extensive consumption of carbon stocks in Canada highlights how rapidly climate change is producing conditions for extreme wildfires to thrive across a range of biomes and seasons,” Kolden said.
Europe and South Korea
Severe drought and repeated heat extremes drove major wildfire outbreaks across the Mediterranean in 2025, killing 28 people and displacing more than 120,000. Six European nations made simultaneous emergency resource requests — a sign of the growing strain on firefighting capacity when multiple regions burn at once.
Spain recorded its largest burned area since 2002. Portugal battled the largest wildfire in its national history. France suffered its biggest fire since 1949. The United Kingdom recorded its highest burned area ever, including its first documented megafire — a blaze exceeding 10,000 hectares — in Scotland.
South Korea suffered its deadliest wildfire outbreak on record: 32 people killed, more than 37,000 displaced, and over 100,000 hectares burned as extreme winds drove fires rapidly through mountainous communities.
Theodore Keeping, of World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London, said the conditions behind Europe’s fires carry a clear cause. “The hot-dry-windy weather conditions which drove devastating wildfires across Southern Europe have been made much more likely due to human-caused climate change.”
What Comes Next
The study’s authors call for rapid reductions in fossil fuel emissions, stronger vegetation management, and infrastructure planning built for a world of fast-moving fires.
Jones is not optimistic that the trend reverses without intervention. “It feels like this should be shocking,” he said of 2025’s toll. “But the way things have trended, this is totally in line with recent fire activity.”
This, he said, is the new normal.
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