Not nearly enough yet, but this report from Burlington, VT is a start.
New York Times had a piece last week.
Western Washington state is one of the wettest places in the country. In the North Cascade mountains and on the Olympic Peninsula, lush cedars, ferns and mosses form classic Pacific Northwest rainforests. But even here, climate change is making wildfires more likely. And the state is figuring out how to respond.
“It used to be that it really wasn’t until mid-August that fuels dried out in western Washington,” said Derek Churchill, a forest health scientist at the Washington Department of Natural Resources. “Now it’s July or earlier.” In fact, last month human activity started a wildfire in the Olympic national forest. As of Tuesday, it had grown to more than 5,100 acres and some campgrounds were under evacuation orders.
Fire in Western Washington is not a natural part of the ecosystem’s annual rhythm, as it is for drier grasslands and pine forests in the eastern part of the state. Instead, every few hundred years, a megafire strikes, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, replacing whole forests with slopes of charred spindles.
But global warming is changing fire patterns in the state. Washington’s summers are growing longer, hotter and drier, resulting in an extended fire season with more desiccated fuel available. Paired with swelling populations throughout Puget Sound, it’s a recipe for more frequent annual fires.
More frequent fires in turn increase the odds, slightly but surely, that a megafire will occur. The only question is timing.
As a result, forest managers and firefighters are keeping a wary eye on smaller fires like the Bear Gulch fire currently burning in the Olympics. The last megafire razed western Washington in the early 20th century. More recent fires have been smaller, but concerning. In 1978, more than 1,000 acres burned in the Hoh Rainforest, which can receive as much annual precipitation as the wettest reaches of the Amazon Rainforest. In 2015, more than 2,000 acres of the Olympic rainforest caught fire along the Queets River before fall rains extinguished it.The recent fires in wet forests were “a wake-up call,” said Kyle Smith, the lead forest management scientist at The Nature Conservancy, which manages several forest sites around the state. “It was alarming to see fire burning in the Queets valley.”
The latest data confirms what we’ve long feared: Forest fires are becoming more widespread and destructive around the globe.
Using data from researchers at the University of Maryland, recently updated to cover the years 2001-2024, we calculated that forest fires now burn more than twice as much tree cover each year as they did two decades ago.1
This increase in fire activity has been starkly visible in recent years. Record-setting blazes are becoming the norm, with four of the five worst years for global forest fires occurring since 2020.
2024 was the most extreme year for forest fires on record, with at least 13.5 million hectares of forest burned — an area roughly the size of Greece. This surpassed the previous record of 11.9 million hectares, set in 2023, by about 13%. And some estimatessuggest the true toll of 2024’s fires may have been even higher.
Last year was the first time that major fires raged across both tropical and boreal forests. Brazil, Bolivia, Russia and Canada all experienced some of their worst fire seasons since satellite-based monitoring began in 2001. Extreme wildfires in South America were particularly severe in 2024, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all fire-related tree cover loss globally.
These fires aren’t just impacting the world’s forests. They’ve destroyed homes and infrastructure, polluted drinking water and caused billions of dollars in property damage. Dangerous wildfire smoke is estimated to cause over 1.5 million deaths each year. As fires worsen, so do their impacts, underscoring the urgency of getting them in check.
As fires worsen — including in historically low-risk areas, like the tropics — they are becoming an increasingly prevalent driver of global forest loss. Fires accounted for almost half (44%) of all tree cover loss per year between 2023 and 2024. This marks a sharp rise from 2001-2022, when fires accounted for about one-quarter of annual tree cover loss on average. Coupled with other persistent drivers, like agriculture and logging, this is part of the reason forest loss has remained stubbornly high, despite countries’ promises to combat it.