Forests around the world are taking longer to recover from severe wildfires – potentially indicating forest decline, according to a new study.
The research, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds a “significant increase” in the severity of forest fires from 2001-10 to 2010-21 – especially in western North America, parts of Siberia and south-eastern Australia.
It also finds that recovery from large fires has become “more difficult” for forests in recent years, particularly in the boreal forests of the far-northern latitudes.
Furthermore, fewer than one-third of all forests studied recovered successfully within seven years of a “megafire” – a broad term used to refer to extreme fires.
A “surprising discovery” was that fire severity had the largest impact on forest recovery – even more than climate change, one of the study authors tells Carbon Brief.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, notes that the findings are “expected, but not previously reported on such a large scale”.
‘Significantly increased’ severity
The area burned by forest wildfires around the world increased by about 5% annually between 2001 and 2023, according to analysis from the World Resources Institute.
Burning forests release carbon dioxide (CO2) and these emissions can continue for years after the fire has been extinguished. CO2 emissions from forest fires soared by 60% globally between 2001 and 2023, a 2024 study found.
Fire can also harm plant and animal life in a forest, although it is not always harmful for ecosystems. Forests are sometimes burned in a controlled manner to clear debris and rejuvenate soils.
But more frequent and more intense wildfires, fuelled by climate change, can destroy forests and make recovery more challenging.
In the new study, researchers set out to assess whether intensifying fires and climate change have made post-wildfire forest recovery more difficult since 2010.
They use remote sensing data to identify 3,281 forest fires around the world larger than 10 square kilometres between 2001 and 2021. They focus on forests that were not impacted by deforestation or other fires in the seven years after a large fire took place, which the study describes as a “critical timeframe for recovery and reconstruction”.
Focusing on one-off, large fires allowed the researchers to “more accurately isolate” the drivers of the natural post-fire recovery and avoid the “confounding effects from re-burning disturbances”, Qiancheng Lv, a PhD student from Beijing Normal University, the new study’s first author, tells Carbon Brief.
They find that fire severity has “significantly increased” around the world, especially in boreal forests, since 2001, another author, Prof Ziyue Chen from Beijing Normal University, tells Carbon Brief.
This is the “primary factor” behind forests taking longer to recover from fires, the study finds. Chen adds:
“More concerningly, the adverse impacts of changing environmental conditions – especially rising temperatures and soil moisture deficits – on forest recovery are intensifying, necessitating urgent attention.”
The maps below highlight the difference in severity from large fires between 2001-10 (top) and 2011-21 (bottom). The researchers use an index called the differential normalised burn ratio (dNBR), which evaluates the level of burn damage after a fire.
They highlight five “hotspots” that frequently experience severe large-scale fires: western North America, northern South America, parts of Siberia, south Asia and south-eastern Australia.
Climate role
The research finds that all forest types experienced more severe fires since 2010, but that evergreen needleleaf forests were most vulnerable to damage.
Western North America and central and eastern parts of northern Siberia experienced the more severe fires, the study finds, and also saw the largest increase in severity after 2010. “Very few” forests in these two regions successfully recovered from fires within the study period – and most are still in the process of healing, the study adds.
The researchers use machine-learning models to assess the impact of different factors on post-fire recovery. Fire severity primarily influences initial recovery conditions, compared to climate factors, which impact successful vegetation regrowth.
They find that fire severity “had a more significant impact on forest recovery than climate change”. This “dominant role” was the team’s “most surprising discovery”, Chen tells Carbon Brief.
But, the authors note that current climate conditions “have become increasingly unfavourable” for forest recovery from fires, particularly due to rising temperatures.
The study finds that higher temperatures “generally accelerated post-fire forest recovery” before 2010, but had “strong negative impacts” since 2010.
Prof Chaoyang Wu, another author of the study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, tells Carbon Brief:
“While numerous studies report beneficial effects of warming on vegetation greenness and productivity, our results suggest these benefits may diminish or reverse as temperatures surpass optimal ranges for photosynthesis.”
The chart below shows the different factors impacting forest recovery times. The differential normalised burn ratio – a measure of the damage caused by a fire – has the biggest impact, followed by temperature and soil moisture.
This finding contrasts with a 2024 study, which found that post-fire climate conditions had the biggest impact on forest recovery.
Accounting for this difference, Chen says that the new research focuses on “high-severity megafires”, whereas the 2024 study looks at all fire types. He adds:
“This finding highlights the critical need to account for fire scale in future post-fire recovery research, particularly as wildfire extent and intensity are projected to intensify under climate change.”
Forest recovery ‘stagnation’
The team uses multiple indices to assess three different aspects of forest recovery in the years after the fire: vegetation density, forest canopy structure and forest productivity.
The average time required for three indicators to recover to pre-fire conditions has increased by around 8% for vegetation density, 11% for canopy structure and 27% for gross primary productivity since 2010.
This results in overall recovery times that were several months to almost a year longer, compared to 2001-10 recovery times. The percentage of forests taking six years to recover from fires increased from around 11-13% before 2010 to 16-22% post-2010.
The first three years after a fire are “critical for forest recovery”, the researchers say, with many recovery assessments returning to upwards of 75% of pre-fire conditions during this time.
After this, recovery can slow down. The study finds that the percentage of forests experiencing this “stagnation” grew slightly from almost 23% before 2010 to almost 26% after 2010.
Prof Guido van der Werf from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research, tells Carbon Brief:
“It is a neat paper that quantifies something that is expected, but not previously reported on such a large scale: with increased fire activity in forests there seems to be slower recovery. This makes sense if fires are getting more severe due to climate change and, in some regions, due to having a growing fire deficit.”
The study finds that forests in humid regions generally recovered “relatively rapidly” after fires, while those in drier regions took longer. Around 60-80% of forests that successfully recovered from fires within seven years were located in humid regions.
‘Important analysis’
Dr Bernardo Flores, a researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, says the new work is a “very important analysis” that aligns with previous research.
Flores, who was not involved in this study, has researched the impact of fires and other disturbances on the Amazon rainforest. He tells Carbon Brief that these findings are a “bad sign for the world and also for tropical forests”, adding:
“If global forest flammability is rising, this will also affect tropical forests during drier years, as we saw in 2023-24 in the Amazon.”
The researchers note that few Earth system and vegetation growth models currently account for fires – and none account for changes in forest recovery time. Van der Werf tells Carbon Brief:
“One of the implications is that forests may shift sooner from being a [carbon] sink to being a source, or smaller sink, as increased fire activity and severity and slower regrowth means that less carbon is stored in forests and more in the atmosphere.”
The post Forests taking longer to recover from severe ‘megafires’ since 2010 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Forests taking longer to recover from severe ‘megafires’ since 2010
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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