joaotome.com · Wildfire data · Published 8 September 2026
The answer depends on what we count. A current European snapshot is running well above its usual level, while the longer satellite record shows forest fire rising sharply in North America and moving differently in Europe and Australia.
Freshness: WHO Europe benchmark checked 2 September 2026 · EFFIS/CWFIS snapshot dated 17 July 2026 · satellite backbone ends in 2024.
For the latest available period, European burning is unusually high. Over the longer record, the clearest signal is regional: forest burn rises in North America while Europe moves the other way.
How to read it: 2026 is a running season snapshot. The annual comparison below ends in 2025, and the forest record ends in 2024. Keeping those clocks separate prevents a partial year from looking like a completed one.
The latest complete annual comparison runs from 2012–2018 to 2019–2025. The table separates mapped fire counts, total area and the pooled area burned per mapped fire. Those measures can point in different directions.
What changed in the latest complete 14-year record?
Annual averages, all land covers. Latest complete year: 2025. 2026 is excluded because the fire season is still under way.
The area-per-fire column is pooled area divided by pooled mapped-fire count within each period. “Uncertain” means its descriptive resampling interval crosses zero. This later GWIS series is separate from the 2002–2024 MODIS land-cover analysis below.
A bigger burned area can come from more fires, larger fires, or both. These three aligned views show which mechanism changed between 2012–18 and 2019–25. Zero means no change.
Regional change, measured three ways
Each dot is the percentage change in the annual average. Hover for the underlying averages and the country-level reading.
Source: GWIS all-land-cover series via Our World in Data, 2012–2025. 2026 is not included because the season is incomplete.
Country exceptions, with scale included
Annual averages in hectares or events. The change column compares the two periods; the small bar shows the later-period scale relative to the largest row in that metric.
“Uncertain” marks a change whose bootstrap interval for hectares per fire crosses zero. It describes instability in this short, skewed series; it is not a formal climate-trend test.
The newest official update gives the clearest current benchmark. EU countries had burned more than 600,000 hectares in the first eight months of 2026, over twice the recent 20-year average. WHO Europe says the same-date total for 2025 was higher, so 2026 is an unusually active season rather than a new record in that comparison.
How the 2026 European season compares
EU countries, first eight months of each year. The 2026 value is a lower bound (“more than 600,000 ha”), so the bar is deliberately marked as open-ended. 2025 is identified as the worst year on record without inventing a total that the source does not publish here.
Source: WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2 September 2026. “More than” is shown as a lower bound, not a precise total.
The pressure is moving beyond the Mediterranean
WHO Europe warns that extremely dry conditions are raising fire risk in the British Isles and southern Scandinavia, regions that have historically been cooler and wetter. It also reports that reported fires in Portugal and Spain were up more than 100% in January–July 2026 versus the same period in 2025.
The Iberia figure is a reported-fire count change, not burned area. WHO Europe statement, 24 July 2026.
The long-run record describes patterns. It cannot attribute an individual fire to climate change, and it shows different patterns by place and measure. The next sections test the forest-specific signal and how much the record is shaped by extreme seasons.
The estimate is the change in average annual forest burn between 2002–11 and 2015–24. The line shows how much that estimate moves when each decade is repeatedly resampled. It makes the signal, and the uncertainty created by extreme seasons, visible together.
Forest burned area, later decade versus earlier decade
The dot is the change in the two decade averages. The whisker is a 95% descriptive resampling interval. The chart keeps the point estimates readable; the exact intervals are in the expandable table.
Canada is the clearest increase in this record. Europe is a counter-signal. Australia and Greece rise, with intervals that show how strongly the estimates depend on a small number of extreme seasons.
Read forest and total burned area against each other. Australia's total fell 21% while its forest burn rose 48%. North America's total rose 14%, while forest burn rose 58%. Europe is the exception: both measures fell, while forest's share of the burn was broadly unchanged (6.7% → 7.1%).
The annual history: where the spikes sit
Each cell is forest area burned in that year. Darker cells are larger within that country, so this view makes exceptional seasons visible without pretending Portugal and Canada are the same size.
Hover a cell for the exact area and that country’s rank. The underlying series runs 2002–2024.
Both lines are indexed so that each region's own 2002–2011 average = 100. That puts total and forest on one scale, so the gap between the lines is the whole point.
Total burned area vs. forest burned area, indexed to each region's 2002–2011 average
Index = 100 means "same as that region's first-decade average". The solid line is forest; the dashed line is all land cover combined.
The thick horizontal bars are each decade's average. The gap between each bar and 100 is the decade shift beneath the year-to-year noise. Australia’s 2019 forest index reaches 733, so its panel marks the value above the displayed range.
The indexed view shows direction. This shows magnitude — and it is dominated by a handful of catastrophic years.
Annual forest area burned, by country
Million hectares of forest land cover burned per year, 2002–2024. Portugal is included at true scale — which is itself the point about how the Iberian story differs in magnitude from the boreal one.
Canada’s 2023 season accounts for 30% of its 2002–2024 forest-burn total. Australia’s three largest years account for 51%; the concentration chart below names those years and shows the denominator.
The land-cover mix explains why a national total can move differently from forest burn. In Australia, shrubland and grassland dominate the total; in Canada, forest is a much larger share.
What burns: annual burned area by land cover type
Each region's average annual burned area, 2015–2024, split by land cover. Use the toggle to switch between absolute area and composition.
Forest is 15.4% of North America's burned area, 7.1% of Europe's, and just 1.7% of Australia's — where shrub and grassland alone are 87%, and grass, shrub and savanna together 97%. A wet-then-dry cycle in the Australian rangelands can move the national total sharply, so total-area movement should not be read as a forest-fire trend.
This record cannot show a smooth annual trend. It can show whether recent seasons more often clear each country's own high historical threshold, and how much total burn is concentrated in a few catastrophic years.
How often did forest burn exceed the earlier decade's high threshold?
An extreme season is one above the 90th percentile of that country's 2002–11 forest-burn record. Each dot is one season, so this is a frequency count, not an area total.
The threshold is country-specific. Because it is the earlier decade’s 90th percentile, roughly one in ten earlier observations is expected to clear it by construction. The useful comparison is whether the later decade clears it more often.
Share of 23 years of forest burn concentrated in the three worst years
Of all forest area burned 2002–2024, the percentage that came from just three fire seasons.
This is the severity half of the story. In Greece, three summers produced three-quarters of two decades of forest fire.
The satellite land-cover backbone ends in 2024. EFFIS and CWFIS provide a separate snapshot dated 17 July 2026, while the WHO Europe benchmark was checked on 2 September. The dates and methods stay visible because the series cannot be merged into one trend.
Annual burned area, Iberia and Greece: EFFIS fire perimeters, 2006–2026
Hectares burned in fires of roughly 30 ha or larger, as mapped by EFFIS. 2026 (rightmost, hatched) is a partial season — it will keep growing through the autumn.
Spain's 2025 (393,079 ha) is its highest completed year in this extract — ahead of 2022. Portugal's 2025 (278,917 ha) is its second-highest completed year, behind only 2017. Greece was having a quiet year at the July snapshot. The 9–10 July Almería fire (Los Gallardos, ~3,200–3,800 ha, 13 dead) sits inside Spain's 2026 bar. The figures are a 17 July snapshot, not the latest Europe-wide total.
The current context, country by country
Completed 2025 totals are comparable within this EFFIS extract. 2026 values are partial through 17 July and are shown separately.
2025 completed ranking
2026 snapshot
EFFIS maps fires of roughly 30 ha or larger from agency and satellite sources. A partial 2026 value must not be ranked against a completed year.
Canada, year-to-date area burned vs. historical averages
Cumulative area burned by 17 July each year — so every bar is a fair, same-date comparison, not a full-season total.
The 2026 bar is 41% above the 20-year same-date average and 15% above the 10-year average. It remains below the five-year average because that short baseline includes the exceptional 2023 season. This is a baseline-sensitivity result, not evidence that 2026 will finish below a normal full season.
France, quietly, already had a bigger July than all of 2025. By 17 July, France's 2026 season (41,650 ha) had already surpassed its entire 2025 total (36,951 ha) — with the rest of the summer still ahead. Not dramatic yet, but worth watching alongside Spain and Portugal.
Portugal: fewer mapped fires, severe outliers
The satellite record points to a concentrated risk pattern. The EFFIS snapshot adds a current national reference without mixing methods.
Portugal’s national fire-service series (ICNF) counts many smaller incidents than either GWIS or EFFIS. A proper Portugal deep dive should join ICNF ignition, cause and response data to weather indices.
Burned hectares describe the event. Smoke carries the consequence across borders. The latest WMO bulletin links the 2025 fire season to a PM2.5 hotspot in north-western Spain and places today’s fires inside a much longer global rise in extreme smoke events.
From dry conditions to health risk
A compact reading of the evidence, with the geography and time window kept explicit.
Source: WMO Air Quality and Climate Bulletin No. 6, 7 September 2026. The global estimate and trend are included as context, not as measurements of this dashboard’s European sample.
Methodology note: EFFIS maps individual fire perimeters ≥ ~30 ha from a mix of satellite and agency data — a different method from the MODIS land-cover pixel classification used in sections 1–4 above. The two series use different units, different fire-size cutoffs, and don't include a land-cover split, so they are never plotted on the same axis and shouldn't be quoted against each other. 2026 totals are running counts as of the retrieval date and will rise before the season ends.
Three conclusions survive the different sources and time windows.
1. 2026 is an unusually active European season. WHO Europe reports more than 600,000 hectares burned in EU countries in the first eight months, over twice the same-window 20-year average. The 2025 same-date total was higher, so this is a high season rather than a new record.
2. The longer forest record is regional, not uniform. Forest burn rose 326% in Canada and fell 28% in Europe between the two decade averages. Australia’s total area fell while its forest component rose. The sample supports divergence, not a single global direction.
3. A few seasons dominate the damage. Three years account for 59% of Portugal’s forest-burn total, while Canada’s 2023 season alone accounts for 30% of its record. That concentration makes averages sensitive to exceptional years and gives fire-weather conditions an outsized influence on the headline.