Like so many others, I spent late July choking on smoke as wildfires, worsened by fossil-fueled climate change, raged across Canada and the United States, as well as France, Greece, Spain and Turkey. People, including firefighters, lost their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, with many losing everything. And millions of people across the U.S., many living hundreds of miles from the wildfires, experienced dangerous levels of pollution from wildfire smoke.

The undeniable fingerprints of climate change are all over recent extreme wildfire seasons. Across the world, unusually hot, dry weather, punctuated by extreme heatwaves, has dried out ecosystems, priming them for fire. In the U.S., the burned area in 2026 is currently 168 percent of the 10-year average, while many fires continue to burn out of control.

Globally, burned area is decreasing, but not all fires are equal. Most of the reduction in global burned area comes from savannahs and grasslands, as changes in agricultural practice and land use reduce intentional fires and burned area.

In contrast, fire activity and burned area in North America’s forests continue to intensify, burning large areas with growing severity. These fires can burn so severely that they scorch the soil deeply, and some forests cannot regrow. In Canada’s boreal forests, wildfires also generate huge amounts of heat-trapping emissions, combusting soil that took decades or centuries to accumulate. In 2023, Canada’s record-smashing fire season emitted more carbon than every country in the world except China, India and the U.S.

Wildfires in forests of the western U.S. are some of the most well-studied, and the effects of climate change are glaring across almost every metric scientists use to characterize wildfire. Relative to the mid-1980s, more wildfires are burning larger areas, at higher severity, growing faster, at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. Wildfires also are burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, meaning less rest for the wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect us.

Attribution science, which isolates and quantifies the contribution of climate change to observed trends, makes this point even more clearly, showing that climate-driven increases in dryness led to a near doubling of burned area in forests of western North America between 1984 and 2015.

Climate change also limits options to use existing, science-supported tools to reduce wildfire risks, like prescribed fire, by shortening the very narrow window in which these controlled burns can safely occur. While forest management can mitigate some effects, climate-driven extreme fire behavior can overwhelm these interventions.

Climate change further drives conditions conducive to wildfire beyond changes to forests, with reductions in snowpack and earlier melt providing more time for vegetation to dry out.

These climate-fueled changes have devastated communities, destroying homes, claiming lives and ending ways of life. The damage of these wildfires is escalating too — last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles killed at least 30 people and produced estimated losses of $140 billion, while property insurance skyrocketed, if it remained accessible at all. As global temperatures continue to rise, this destruction will keep mounting.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, have been well known for decades, including by fossil fuel companies that publicly denied what their own research showed and deceived the public to protect their profits.

Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has quantified how heat-trapping emissions traced to the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell, have worsened these hot, dry and fire-prone conditions. From 1986 to 2021, nearly 40% of the area burned in forests of western North America can be attributed to their emissions. Our newest study finds that across the western U.S., emissions traced to these entities reduced annual snowpack and stream flow by 15% and 6%, respectively, equivalent to nearly six times the annual water use of all California’s cities.

Wildfires have many contributing factors. Dismissing the role of fossil-fueled climate change in driving extreme wildfires is at odds with the best available science and only serves the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, communities, firefighters and first responders need policymakers to advance real solutions­ — including measures to stop corporate deception, advance a phaseout of fossil fuels, and make polluters pay their fair share — to address this wicked problem.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Carly Phillips is a senior research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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