The modern age of burning has been ignited by human hands.
Though wildfires are natural and necessary in many ecosystems, their expanding path of destruction in recent years has been worsened by all the different ways humanity has reshaped the environment. Cities have sprawled out farther, populations have grown, the global economy has expanded, natural fires have been suppressed, and the climate has warmed.
Now, the pace of destruction from massive wildfires is accelerating. In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers have pulled apart these drivers and found that rising average temperatures are contributing to the gargantuan price tags of these blazes, with a major spike in just the past decade.
Just earlier this year, the Los Angeles fires led to estimated losses between $28 billion and $75 billion, likely the costliest fire disaster in history.
And since then, fires have continued to rage around the world. The European Union this year suffered its worst wildfire season since tracking began in 2006, with more than 2 million acres burned across countries like Spain and Portugal. A major wildfire in Namibia is currently burning through one of Africa’s largest wildlife parks. Firefighters only recently contained the Dragon Bravo fire that ignited in Arizona in July and torched 140,000 acres near the Grand Canyon.
When a major fire ignites, the news coverage tends to center on the number of charred acres, but for many people, that can be hard to interpret. And the size of the blaze doesn’t always translate directly to the amount of suffering caused. “We wanted to move beyond quantifying fire by burned area to fire defined by human impacts,” said John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at the University of California Merced and a co-author of the new study.
And so, Abatzoglou and his collaborators looked at fires that did the greatest harm to people in terms of lives lost and property burned to see what trends emerged. They found that the number of extraordinarily devastating wildfires has risen dramatically in just the past few years, driven by some of the hottest, driest conditions ever recorded.
It’s an alarming result that shows that the impacts of wildfires are not simply getting gradually worse. We are seeing sudden jumps in severity. Such fires will put a greater strain on governments and financial systems while raising the costs of living for ordinary homeowners and renters. And failing to adapt to a world primed to ignite will put more people and property in danger.
Why wildfires started getting way more expensive
Wildfires restore nutrients to soil, clear decaying vegetation, and even help some plants germinate. And for millennia, Indigenous people in regions like the Western United States harnessed fire as a tool for living alongside landscapes that can burn.
But now, people ignite the vast majority of wildfires, and with more homes and highways encroaching on wildlands, there are more sparks finding their way to grasses, shrubs, and trees. Invasive plant species that hitched a ride with travelers are creating continuous beds of fuel that can enhance the spread of flames. Growing populations close to fire-prone landscapes has also meant that land managers are incentivized to try to suppress natural fires, as well as cultural burning practices.
Because of all of this, fuels have accumulated to unnaturally high levels.
To get a handle on how the wildfire threat is evolving, Abatzoglou and his colleagues drew on a database of fire losses between 1980 and 2023 tallied by Munich Re, a reinsurance firm. Reinsurance is insurance for insurance companies. It kicks in after a major disaster, when frontline insurance firms get overwhelmed with claims. Since they have clients all over the world, reinsurance companies often have a broad picture of how the costs from disasters are changing over time, but this information is usually proprietary. According to Munich Re, global wildfire losses between 2015 and 2024 added up to $136 billion.
From the dataset, the researchers zeroed in on the losses from two types of fires: those ranked in the top 200 most costly fires, and those that killed 10 or more people. Of the 200 most costly fires on record, 43 percent were in just the last decade. The data shows that, even though the global economy has grown, fires are burning up a growing share of this prosperity. And the frequency of fires that killed 10 or more people increased by a factor of 3.1 between 1980 and 2023, while the global population increased by a factor of 1.8.
Most of the devastation was concentrated in a handful of exceptionally severe fires under unusual conditions. The key ingredients behind many of these exceptionally severe fires was long-term drought coupled with some of the hottest and driest weather ever experienced. “About half of these events occurred under the top 0.1 percent of fire weather days,” Abaztoglou said.
The analysis showed that frequency and severity of fire conditions increased dramatically between 1980 to 2023, leading to what researchers described as a “step change” in the number of fire disasters in 2015.
“Climate change is certainly increasing the odds of some of these ingredients materializing more often on the severe side,” Abatzoglou said.
The results tie together trends that fire researchers have been picking up on for years now. “They do a nice job presenting that fires are happening at the extremes of these conditions and these extremes are happening more frequently,” said Jude Bayham, an associate professor of agriculture and resource economics at Colorado State University. He studies wildfire management and was not involved in the study. “We can think about these damages as a manifestation of the cost of climate change.”
How you will foot the bill for major fires
The effects of more expensive wildfires are already rippling through businesses and banks around the world. The mounting damage totals from disasters like wildfires have contributed to rising reinsurance rates, which, in turn, can make homeowner’s insurance policies more expensive.
Unfortunately, too, these trends are very difficult to drive in the other direction. Fires are often found in areas with rich vegetation, warm weather, and ample water for at least part of the year, traits that also make these areas attractive for settlements. “A perfect climate for fire is also the perfect climate for people,” Abatzoglou said.
And even with a better understanding of climate change and fire dynamics, it’s difficult to predict which people and what properties are at risk. “When we look at the fires from this year in Los Angeles, a lot of those structures burned in areas that are not in the official wildland urban interface,” Abatzoglou said. “So even if we do ‘managed retreat,’ we still are going to have assets at risk.”
But “difficult” doesn’t mean “impossible.”
Around the world, deaths from disasters in general are declining. In the US, the number of urban fires has halved since 1980, and some of the factors behind the drop — like putting in place building codes that emphasize fire resistance — can help people cope with wildfires. Measures like early warning systems, improved fire-risk forecasting, and robust evacuation planning can save even more lives. And the history of Indigenous burning practices shows that people can coexist with fires.
The rising financial impacts of wildfires are manageable, too, but they demand reforms to how communities price and distribute risk. Each successive record-breaking fire expands the window of possibilities that insurers have to plan for, and that ends up baked into how much people have to pay to protect their homes.
In places like California, private insurance companies have been dropping their customers in high fire-risk areas, and some have left the state entirely in recent years. The regulations make it hard for these companies to stay in business and don’t provide enough incentives to reward tactics that can reduce fire risk, like cutting back shrubs and trees around homes.
“If fuel management is a valuable activity for reducing wildfire severity and economic loss, why aren’t insurance companies conditioning policies on fuel management and individual household risk more than they are?” said Jonathan Yoder, a professor of economic sciences at Washington State University who was not involved in the study. “Insurance companies are finding that the costs of doing that kind of premium adjustments to provide incentives for homeowners to reduce the risks of loss for their homes is not worth doing. It’s a costly proposition.”
There’s no way around the fact that humanity will have to adapt to more blazes in a warmer world and make tradeoffs about the threats and costs we will all face. “It’s not about ‘solving’ the wildfire problem,” Yoder said. “It’s a matter of finding a balance.”
The post The surging price tag of wildfires, in one chart appeared first on Vox.
