Record-breaking heat and drought have fueled the world’s worst ever start to a wildfire year, as climate change and a developing El Niño threaten to push extreme weather to new heights.
Over the first four months of this year, more than 150 million hectares (579,150 square miles) was burned, according to satellite estimates from the Global Wildfire Information System. That’s an area nearly the size of Alaska and roughly double the seasonal average for this period.
“This rapid start, in combination with the forecast El Niño means that we’re looking at a particularly severe year,” said Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather and climate researcher at Imperial College London.
This year’s early season wildfires have overwhelmed fire crews in Argentina, Chile and Japan, while fueling historic blazes in the US and Southeast Asia.
The fire surge is a symptom of a broader trend of extreme weather that’s expected to worsen this year. Heat waves are likely to put further pressure on agricultural systems and global supply chains for food, while higher cooling demand could compound the energy shock from the Iran war, scientists say.
Sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere is the lowest recorded for this time of year, and oceans are approaching record-high temperatures, data from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute show. New heat records have already been set this year, from Australia and Greenland to France and the US Southwest. Spain and Brazil have witnessed historic rainfall.
The extreme weather effects are likely to be amplified even further by El Niño, a naturally recurring warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that can raise global temperatures and worsen heat, drought, floods and fires. US forecasters say El Niño is likely to develop from June to August, and is showing signs of being exceptionally strong.
Human-driven warming alone would likely be enough to fuel weather records this year, but El Niño raises a “serious risk” of unprecedented extremes, said Friederike Otto, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, which organized the press briefing.
Photograph: A firefighter battles the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025; photo credit: Jill Connelly/Bloomberg
Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire