Scientists have long known that fires release substantial amounts of greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere.
However, estimating the total climate impact of fires is challenging.
Now, new satellite data has shed fresh light on the complex interplay between the climate and fires in different landscapes around the world.
It suggests that global emissions from fires are much higher than previously assumed.
In this article, we unpack the latest update to the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) – a resource that combines satellite information on fire activity and vegetation to estimate how fires impact the land and atmosphere.
The latest update to the database – explored in new research published in journal Scientific Data – includes data up to and including the year 2024.
It reveals that, once the data from smaller fires is included, fire emissions sit at roughly 3.4bn tonnes of carbon (GtC) annually – significantly higher than previous estimates.
It also shows that carbon emissions from fires have remained stable over the past two to three decades, as rising emissions from forest fires have been offset by a decline in grassland fire emissions.
The database update also illustrates how the amount of area burned around the world each year is falling as expanding agriculture has created a fragmented landscape and new restrictions on crop residue burning have come into force.
Landscape fires
Fire events vary widely in cause, size and intensity. They take place across the globe in many types of landscapes – deserts and ice sheets are the only biomes that are immune to fire.
When vegetation burns, it releases greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. It also releases pollutants that cause local air pollution and, on a global scale, have a cooling effect on the climate.
Forest fires often generate considerable media attention, especially when they threaten places where people live.
However, the forest fires that make the news represent just a small fraction of all fires globally.
More than 95% of the world’s burned area occurs in landscapes with few trees, such as savannahs and grasslands.
Fires have helped maintain tropical savannah ecosystems for millions of years. Savannahs have the perfect conditions for fire: a wet season which allows grasses and other “fuels” to grow, followed by an extended dry season where these fuels become flammable.
Historically, these fires were ignited by lightning. Today, they are mostly caused – intentionally or accidentally – by humans.
And yet, despite their prevalence, these fires receive relatively little media attention. This is not surprising, as they have been part of the landscape for so long and rarely threaten humans, except for their impact on air quality.
Fires also occur in croplands. For example, farmers may use fire to clear agricultural residues after harvest, or during deforestation to clear land for cultivation.
The term “landscape fires” is increasingly used to describe all fires that burn on land – both planned and unplanned.
(The term “wildfire”, on the other hand, covers a subset of landscape fires which are unplanned and typically burn in underdeveloped and underinhabited land.)
Calculating the carbon emissions of landscape fires is important to better understand their impact on local air quality and the global climate.
New data
In principle, calculating carbon emissions from fires is straightforward. The amount of vegetation consumed by fire – or “fuel consumption” – in one representative “unit” of burned area has to be multiplied by the total area burned.
Fuel consumption can be determined through field measurements and satellite analysis.
For example, the burned area of a relatively small fire can be measured by walking around the perimeter with a GPS device. Fuel consumption, meanwhile, can be derived by measuring the difference in amount of vegetation before and after a fire, something that is usually only feasible with planned fires.
In practice, however, fires are unpredictable and highly variable, making accurate measurement difficult.
To track where and when fires occur, researchers rely on satellite observations.
For two decades, NASA’s MODIS satellite sensors have provided a continuous, global record of fire activity. To avoid too many false alarms, the algorithms these satellites use are built in a way so fires are flagged only when they burn an entire 500-metre grid cell.
However, this approach misses many smaller fires – resulting in conservative estimates of total burned area.
The latest update to the GFED includes, for the first time, finer-resolution satellite data, including from the European Space Agency’s “sentinel missions”.
This data shows that fires too small to be picked up by a satellite with a 500-metre spatial resolution are extremely common. So common, in fact, that they nearly double previous estimates of global burned area.
The data shows that, on average, 800 hectares of land – an area roughly the size of Australia – has burned annually over the past two decades.
The map below shows the frequency of fires around the world. Regions shaded in dark red burn, on average, 50-100% each year. In other words, fires occur annually or biannually. Regions in dark blue, on the other hand, are those where fires occur, but are very infrequent. Most regions fall in between these extremes.
The map shows that the areas most prone to fire are largely found in the world’s savannah and agricultural regions.
Falling burned area
Over recent decades, the total burned area globally each year has been declining.
This is largely due to land-use change in regions which used to have frequent fires.
For example, savannah is being converted to croplands in Africa. This transforms a frequently burning land-use type to one that does not burn – and creates a more fragmented landscape with new firebreaks which limit the spread of fire.
The decline in burned area is also due to the introduction of more stringent air quality regulations limiting crop residue burning in much of the world, including the European Union.
The amount of “fuel” – or biomass – in a unit area of land varies greatly. Arid grasslands are biomass-poor and, therefore, produce less carbon emissions when burned, whereas fuel consumption in tropical forests with peat soils is extremely high.
Maps of carbon emissions from fires closely resemble maps of burned area. However, they typically highlight biomass-rich areas, such as dense forests.
This is illustrated in the map below, which shows how fires in regions coloured dark red on the map produce, on average, 1,000-5,000 grams of carbon per square metre. In these places, much more carbon is lost during fires than gained through photosynthesis.
Meanwhile, much of the world’s savannah regions are coloured in yellow and orange on the map, indicating that fires here produce between 100-500 grams of carbon per square metre.
Rising forest fire carbon emissions
The boost in fire emissions captured by the latest version of the GFED is most pronounced in open landscapes, including savannahs, grasslands and shrublands.
Forest fire emissions, on the other hand, have barely changed in the updated version of the database. This is because most forest fires are relatively large and were already well captured by the coarse resolution satellite data used previously.
However, the trend in forest fire emissions is sloping upwards over the study period.
Overall, current estimates – which take into account the new data from smaller fires – suggest that, over 2002-22, global fire emissions averaged 3.4GtC per year.
This is roughly 65% higher than estimates set out in the previous update to the GFED, which was published in 2017.
For comparison, today’s fossil fuel emissions are around 10GtC per year.
Comparisons between fire and fossil fuel carbon emissions are somewhat flawed, as much of the carbon released by fires is eventually reabsorbed when vegetation regrows.
However, this is not the case for fires linked to deforestation or the burning of tropical peatlands, where regrowth is either much slower – or non-existent, if forests are converted to agriculture. These fires account for roughly 0.4GtC each year – just less than 12% of total fire emissions – and contribute directly to the long-term rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).
The traditional view of forest fires as “carbon-neutral” is increasingly uncertain as the climate changes due to human activity. Longer fire seasons, drier vegetation and more lightning-induced ignitions are increasing fire frequency in many forested regions.
This is most apparent in the rapidly-warming boreal forests of the far-northern latitudes. The year 2023 saw the highest emissions ever recorded by satellites in boreal forests, breaking a record set just two years before.
Moreover, the fires in boreal forests are becoming more intense – meaning they burn hotter and consume a larger fraction of vegetation. This, in turn, jeopardises the recovery of forests.
In cold areas, fires also cause permafrost to break down faster. This happens because fires remove an organic soil layer that has an insulating effect which prevents permafrost thaw.
The map below shows the dominant fire type in different regions of the world, including boreal forest fires (dark green), cropland fires (red), open savannah (darker yellow) and woody savannah (brown).
Changing ‘pyrogeography’
Thanks to more precise satellite data we now know that fire emissions are higher than we thought previously, with the new version of GFED having 65% higher overall fire emissions than its predecessor.
However, all evidence suggests that emissions from fires have been stable over the past two to three decades. This is because an increase in forest fire emissions is being offset by a decline in grassland fire emissions.
The world’s changing “pyrogeography” is illustrated in the bar chart below, which breaks down annual fire emissions across different types of biome.
It shows how low-intensity grassland fires with modest fuel consumption – represented in yellow and brown – have declined over time, while high-intensity forest fires – illustrated in green colours – are becoming more prominent, albeit with substantial variability in emissions year-on-year.
The post Guest post: Why carbon emissions from fires are significantly higher than thought appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why carbon emissions from fires are significantly higher than thought
Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is the Executive Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), an Indonesia-based economic think tank. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the Director of the China-Indonesia desk at CELIOS.
Indonesia produces around 60% of the world’s nickel, a metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – more than any other country in the world. But in 2026, the government sharply reduced how much of its nickel can be extracted from the ground.
Production quotas were reduced by around 40% this year compared to 2025. Weda Bay, the largest nickel mine on Earth, had its allowance cut by more than 70% and exhausted its full-year quota by the end of May, halting mining entirely; it cannot resume large-scale extraction until next year unless regulators grant an extension.
The policy has sparked a vivid debate in Indonesian policy circles: how can the country shift its strategy from a decade of mining vast quantities of cheap nickel to producing a high-value and low-carbon material that the rest of the world wants for EV batteries.
The cuts aren’t a silver bullet to clean up Indonesia’s nickel industry, whose smelters are powered by coal – the most polluting fossil fuels. But alongside stricter enforcement of environmental rules, it is one side of efforts to produce more sustainable nickel for a premium.
Restricting Indonesia’s nickel output
Production quotas were introduced to stop the collapse of nickel prices because of oversupply in the market. Prices had fallen more than 40% in 2023 alone and kept sliding as Indonesian supply kept growing, hitting a four-year low of around $13,900 a ton in late 2025.
Critics called the recent tightening of production quotas proof that Indonesia’s nickel strategy has failed, arguing that the industry shouldn’t need to throttle its own output to survive. But when assessed against what the policy was supposed to do – push up nickel prices – it has worked. Prices jumped to $20,000 a ton in May, the highest since 2024.
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Chinese industry groups representing companies that have invested billions to mine and refine the country’s nickel were furious, warning Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto that the cuts put $50 billion worth of investment at risk. But much of that Chinese capital is sunk into smelters and processing plants built specifically to run on Indonesian ore, and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. That gives Jakarta more room to hold its ground than the warning suggests.
Stronger environmental enforcement
Since the start of the year, Indonesia’s forestry task force has seized more than four million hectares of land from mines and plantations operating illegally in protected forests, collecting over two trillion rupiah ($113 million) in fines.
This included 148 hectares seized from Weda Bay for lacking a forestry permit. The share of nickel produced from illegal small-scale mining also fell from about a quarter in 2022 to roughly 10% by 2024.
The crackdown responds to serious environmental damages in the nickel industry. On Obi Island, a waste pond collapsed after heavy rain in June 2025, flooding three villages and killing a resident. Internal company tests found chromium-6 – a carcinogen – in the water, in quantities far above the legal limit. The footprint of another mine near Raja Ampat, which is home to some of the world’s richest coral reefs, grew 60-fold in just eight years.
The market is responding to early cleanup efforts. Low-carbon nickel now sells for a real premium, roughly $18,800 to $19,300 a ton compared with $17,900 to $18,300 otherwise, as carmakers seek to source cleaner materials to comply with the European Union’s new emissions rules for imports.
In turn, this is incentivising the industry to do more to green its operations. Vale Indonesia’s smelter in South Sulawesi now runs almost entirely on hydropower, for example.
None of this addresses coal use, however. Major Indonesian nickel producers still emitted an estimated 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Indonesia may be cracking down on illegal mining and rewarding cleaner producers but it is still running its mines on the dirtiest fuel available.
Unequal benefits
For Indonesia to truly benefit from producing cleaner and high-value nickel, it needs to reap the economic benefits too. Although the industry has boosted the country’s economic growth, the reality on the ground tells a different story.
Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi is home to a major smelting complex. Growth in the district jumped from 6% to 22% between 2015 and 2023, driven almost entirely by the nickel industry, according to a study by the Lowy Institute study. At the same time, poverty levels increased slightly and unemployment remained unchanged.
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In Halmahera, another epicentre of the nickel industry, spending by the poorest fifth grew just 5% between 2019 and 2022, compared with 28% for the wealthiest fifth, according to a separate study.
Part of the reason for this inequality is the system for transferring mining royalties to district authorities where the mines are located. In theory, they are entitled to the largest share. But in practice, payments are delayed, companies routinely dispute what they owe and royalties are pooled and distributed across a larger area.
The Natural Resource Governance Institute has found that decentralisation handed local governments power to approve new mines faster than they could build their capacity to manage them. Higher output raises national income on paper, but local governments remain constrained by fiscal rules and infrastructure costs that scale with mining.
None of this makes the 2026 quota cuts a mistake. Indonesia has every right to defend its pricing power over a resource it controls. But limiting extraction isn’t going to fix underlying issues around environmental enforcement and revenue-sharing. That requires rules that are consistently enforced, royalties that reach communities living by the mines, and a plan to wean smelters off coal.
The post Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry appeared first on Climate Home News.
Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry
Climate Change
Risk of “catastrophic” oil spill reaching Kimberley coast found in Woodside’s Scott Reef gas drilling plans
SYDNEY, Monday 24 August 2026 – New analysis of Woodside modelling released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Environs Kimberley has revealed the oil and gas corporation’s plans to drill at Scott Reef could cause an oil spill up to 30 times bigger than the 2009 Montara disaster, impacting the Kimberley coastline and reaching as far as Indonesia.
The new analysis details the “catastrophic” oil spill risk put to environmental regulators for approval by Woodside in its Browse to North West Shelf Project (Browse) plans, the worst-case scenario being a blowout directly below Scott Reef, polluting whale migratory pathways and covering isolated turtle nesting ground with oil condensate.
An FOI application (F348) revealed the federal environment department (DCCEEW) asked offshore oil and gas regulator NOPSEMA to look into the oil spill risk in 2025. NOPSEMA’s response to the application refused access to its report, and one document shows DCCEEW sought further advice this year.
Greenpeace and Environs Kimberley are calling on the Federal Government to publicly release the NOPSEMA report given the risk of an uncontrolled release of oil condensate from directly below Scott Reef.
Hannah Schuch, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Woodside is aware that drilling at Scott Reef risks a massive oil spill that would have severe, far-reaching consequences. It appears environmental regulators are aware too.
“The state and federal governments need to take this risk from Woodside’s drilling plans seriously, as they could end up allowing the worst oil spill in Australian history.
“The pygmy blue whales that migrate up and down the WA coast with their newborns each year could be swimming and feeding in toxic, oil-slicked water. Woodside’s proposal to drill at Scott Reef is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, and the WA and federal governments have one surefire way to prevent catastrophe — reject Browse.”
Martin Prichard, Executive Director at Environs Kimberley, said: “A catastrophic oil spill by Woodside would be disastrous not just for marine life in the area but also for the Kimberley’s $500 million tourism industry.
“The state and federal governments will see five marine parks on the Kimberley coast included in the risk area of a catastrophic Woodside oil spill.
“The Montara oil spill was disastrous for West Timor with the toxic oil destroying seaweed farmers’ livelihoods. The Kimberley dodged a bullet with Montara, we were lucky the spill didn’t head our way. Myself and a crew flew over the Montara oil spill and followed it as far as we could. It was like a scene from a disaster movie.”
After the WA Environmental Protection Authority deemed Browse “unacceptable” due, in part, to oil spill risk, Woodside submitted a mitigation plan based on technology that has never been used “in anger”, a weakness stated in an independent expert review of the plan.
Professor Richard Steiner, independent oil spill expert, said: “A large offshore spill is impossible to effectively contain or recover. Historically, only 2-6% of total spill volume is recovered and the ecological injury from the release of toxic hydrocarbons in the sea can be severe, extensive, and long-term.
“Here in Alaska, government research concludes that several marine populations injured by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, including whales, fish, and seabirds, are still not recovering today, 37 years later. We should expect similar long-term ecological impacts in Western Australia if there were to be a major oil spill. The only sure way to avoid the risk of a catastrophic marine oil spill is to not develop oil and gas projects in marine environments.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Emma Sangalli on emma.sangalli@greenpeace.org or 0431 513 465
What if Australia’s worst offshore oil spill hasn’t happened yet?
I’m terrified by the thought.
Our new report in partnership with Environs Kimberley analyses Woodside’s own oil spill modelling and it reveals a worst-case blowout at the corporation’s proposed Browse gas project at Scott Reef could be up to 30 times larger than the Montara oil spill – one of Australia’s worst environmental disasters to date.
Woodside’s own modelling warns that oil pollution could spread across Scott Reef, the Kimberley coast and beyond, with impacts Woodside itself describes as “severe”, “potentially irreversible” and “catastrophic”.
What’s at stake?
Scott Reef really is like nowhere else on Earth.
Scott Reef is Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef, a pristine marine ecosystem that has thrived for around 15 million years. About 270 kilometres off the Kimberley coast, it supports more than 2,000 marine species, including endangered pygmy blue whales, nesting green sea turtles, the endangered dusky sea snake and ancient corals.
Yet Woodside wants to drill up to 57 toxic wells around and underneath it, causing decades of deafening seismic blasting, light and noise pollution, shipping traffic and, of course, the risk of a ‘catastrophic’ oil spill.
What did Woodside’s modelling find?
Before Browse can be approved, Woodside is required to assess what could happen if something goes wrong. We analysed the corporation’s own environmental assessment documents, and the findings are deeply concerning.
Woodside’s modelling shows that the most severe Browse scenario would be the worst oil spill in Australian history, releasing up to 893,739 barrels of condensate into the Timor Sea. For context, the Montara oil spill released 30,000 barrels of oil.
A blowout of this scale could see oil spread hundreds of kilometres, reaching some of Australia’s most important marine environments, extending into Indonesian and Timor-Leste waters and even washing up along parts of the Kimberley coast. Entrained oil – oil mixed throughout the water column – is predicted to travel up to 863 kilometres from the spill site.
The modelling identifies potential impacts to at least nine marine parks, eight reefs and three Indigenous Protected Areas, as well as important habitats for endangered species, including pygmy blue whales, green sea turtles, seabirds and other marine life.
These aren’t just places on a map. They are globally significant marine ecosystems that support ancient coral reefs, endangered wildlife, tourism, fisheries and coastal communities. A spill of this scale wouldn’t simply affect one reef; it has the potential to impact an entire connected marine ecosystem.
Why this matters now
The most important thing is that Browse has not yet been approved. That means there is still time to stop Browse and the serious risks outlined in Woodside’s own modelling.
The science has been done. The risks have been modelled. The decision now rests with the Australian Government.
Governments are often forced to respond after environmental disasters happen. This is one of those rare moments where they have the opportunity to act before one does.
What you can do
Together, we still have the power to stop Woodside and save Scott Reef.
You can help by:
- Sending an email to Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling on them to reject Browse.
- Sharing this story to help more Australians understand what’s at stake.
- Encouraging your friends and family to take action.
The more people who support saving Scott Reef, the harder it is for governments to approve Woodside’s drilling plans – Browse.
Together, we can ensure a reef that has existed for millions of years is known for its incredible biodiversity – not as the site of Australia’s worst oil spill.
Let’s save Scott Reef.
What if Australia’s worst offshore oil spill hasn’t happened yet?
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