Worldwide, an estimated 440 million people were exposed to a wildfire encroaching on their home at some point between 2002 and 2021, new res
If you've been at all paying attention to the news over the last 10-20 years you would reasonably think that the amount of wild habitat ravaged by wildfires has been drastically increasing. We've all been bombarded with news stories about the horrific fires in the Amazon rainforest, Australia, Canada, and the western US.
Yet something you likely won't see in the news is that the amount of land burned by fires has actually decreased by 26% in the last 19 years.
Since there are more people moving into fire-prone areas (wildland burns more easily than farmland or urban areas) and more people on Earth in general, the number of humans exposed to fire impacts has increased (by 40%) and we have the perception that more land is burning.
But even that doesn't tell the entire story. The vast majority of human exposure to wildfire--around 85%-- occurs in fire-prone regions of Africa. This is also where the vast majority of fires happen. In the past decades the amount of land burned in Africa's fire-prone countries has decreased significantly due to changes in development and agricultural practices.
Fire intensity has been increasing in North and South America, because of a combination of fire management practices and more "fire weather" due to climate change. But those intense, high profile fires in the news make up only around 5% of the burned land and less than 1% of the human fire exposure globally.
To be clear, it is obviously a bad thing that forest fires are impacting more people and we should work to mitigate that as much as possible. But it is also hopeful to know that some of the most disaster-prone regions have seen a dramatic drop in burned land even as climate change has increased fire risk. In most cases the increase in human impact is because we are moving closer to where fires happen, not because the fires themselves are burning more land.
