Author: Hunter Bassler

New research published by the European Union found Russia’s ongoing invasion has worsened environmental challenges in Ukraine, including ongoing wildfire trends.

The risk of large forest fires has “significantly increased” in the nation. The country’s worst wildfire years happened over the last 5 years, by far the worst of which was in 2024, the EU study said.

“The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has severely hampered efforts to prevent and control large fires,” researchers said. “Restrictions on public access to forests and natural landscapes, introduced by Martial Law, have blocked fire prevention activities such as patrolling and establishing firebreaks.”

Numerous other wartime impacts have caused issues for wildfire mitigation, including the enlistment of firefighters and the destruction of fire management infrastructure.

 

Wildfires account for between 45% and 65% of forest cover loss in the nation annually, cover loss that has worsened since the invasion began.

The spike was driven by more frequent heat waves, droughts, and windy weather, which Ukraine’s forest management and emergency response systems were not prepared to deal with.

“Explosive remnants and other potential causes further increase the risk of wildfires, and reallocation of fire-fighting resources makes it more difficult to prevent or control large fires,” the study said. “Climate change also contributed to forest cover loss by significantly increasing the risk of large forest fires, especially in the last five years.”

The largest forest fires in the nation happened in the Eastern and Southern regions, specifically Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kherson oblasts. The fires tended to cluster along the front lines of military, underscoring the close relationship between conflict and forest fires.

Click here for the full study.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management recently released new local pay scales for the nation’s wildland firefighters after lawmakers passed the Wildland Firefighter Payment Protection Act last month.

Lawmakers passed the act as part of the 2025 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act when they narrowly avoided a government shutdown on March 14. The act increases wildland firefighters’ special hourly base rates depending on an employee’s GS, or General Schedule, level. The increases include:

Fire crews are continuing to fight South Korea’s worst wildfire outbreak in history which has left 28 people dead, triggered the evacuation of nearly 40,000 people, and has burned nearly 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres).

Korea Forest Service Chief Lim Sang-seop on Thursday gave an update on the fires that have been burning throughout the nation since last Friday. He said the service had deployed thousands of firefighters, along with aerial and ground firefighting units.

The deaths have included firefighters, including a pilot in a firefighting helicopter who died when his aircraft crashed in a mountain area, officials said.

Sang-seop said crews have an uphill battle ahead. Less than 5mm of rain (0.2 inches) fell in some regions on Thursday, and only 1mm was forecast for Friday. The overall containment and extinguishment rate of the fires sit at around 60%.

“We will do our utmost to prevent the spread of forest fires…We will do our utmost to prevent damage to firefighters and local residents…We will do our utmost to prevent damage to property,” Sang-seop said at the press conference.

Research published last year in the “Agricultural and Forest Meteorology” scientific journal found recent “unprecedented” wildfires across Korea are part of an increasing wildfire activity trend across the region. Korea’s climate regime has reportedly shifted from cold and wet to warm and dry winters, along with a 4°C (7°F) increase in temperature, an 8% decrease in relative humidity, and a 17mm (0.7 inches) decrease in precipitation.

“Dry winter weather has become increasingly severe, resulting in extreme drought in winter 2021 and early spring 2022, with the (fire weather indices) calculations revealing great potential dangers from fires,” the researchers said. “This study highlights that climate change may make forests more vulnerable to fire in temperate and mid-latitude monsoon-affected regions, where large-scale wildfires were not previously a concern.”

Click here to read the full study.

Most of Scotland’s rural communities are under multiple wildfire warnings through Friday as authorities brace for the region’s “most critical period for wildfires.”

An “extreme” wildfire warning will go into effect on Friday for the nation’s low-lying areas, according to the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Until then, all of Scotland’s rural environments will be under a “very high” wildfire warning through Friday.

Once fires ignite in Scotland, they have the potential to burn for days, the service said.

“We are asking the public to exercise extreme caution and think twice before using anything involving a naked flame,” said Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Group Commander Murray Dalgleish. “Livestock, farmland, wildlife, protected woodland and sites of special scientific interest can all be devastated by these fires – as can the lives of people living and working in rural communities.”

Nearly 80% of Scotland’s large outdoor fires since 2010 have burned between March and May, an average of 170 wildfires annually. Prolonged wet weather in 2024 significantly dropped that year’s total to 55, but has fueled the growth of new vegetation across the nation.

In 2023, Scotland and the United Kingdom experienced their worst wildfire in recorded history. The Cannich Fire burned 30 sq miles of woodland in the Scottish Highlands and over half of the Corrimony nature reserve. Before that, the largest fire to burn in the UK was a wildfire in the peatland of Sutherland’s Flow Country in 2019.

The Fire Brigaders Union, which supports firefighters in the UK, said the Cannich Fire was directly connected to the world’s ongoing climate crisis.

“July last year saw the temperature in parts of the UK exceed 40 degrees centigrade for the first time in recorded history, increasing the risk of wildfires,” the union said in 2023. “All governments must heed this stark warning: the climate crisis is here now. We need urgent climate action to prevent loss of life, and that must also involve serious investment in our fire services.”

Around two-thirds of Scotland’s wildfires are accidental, with the most common cause being discarded cigarettes or unattended campfires, the service said.

“To address these risks, SFRS is advancing its Wildfire Strategy, and have invested £1.6 million in specialist equipment and firefighter training to improve its response capabilities,” the service said on its website. “It is crucial that people understand the impact of careless fire-setting. Even with the best intentions, small fires can rapidly spread causing devastating damage.”

A spike in wildfire activity throughout the United States has kicked off an early fire season, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

An estimated 9,520 wildfires have burned 269,986 acres across the nation as of March 14, the NIFC said. The year’s ongoing fire total is above the 10-year average of 6,629 wildfires, but below the 10-year average burned acreage of 431,052.

Over the past decade, the only years that have had more wildfires as of March 14 were 2022 with 12,088 wildfires, and 2017 with 10,328 wildfires.

The trend doesn’t look to be slowing down in the coming months. Numerous states will have significant wildland fire potential between March and June, according to the center’s outlook.

Large portions of multiple southeast states, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, have heightened wildfire potential for all four months, driven in part by past hurricane damage.

“The most notable concerns will be from Hurricane Helene’s impacts across northeast Florida into southern and eastern Georgia, western South Carolina, the North Carolina mountains, and adjacent southwest Virginia into northeast Tennessee,” NIFC said. “Areas from the Florida Big Bend into southern Georgia also saw hurricane damage from Hurricanes Idalia in 2023 and Debby last year. Debris burning, access issues in the mountains, excess dead and increasingly fire-receptive fuels, along with newly opened canopies, will all contribute to enhanced wildland fire potential as long as the fire environment allows.”

Portions of Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, will also have heightened wildfire potential, along with southern areas of Alaska.

Click here to read the full report.

After years of anxiety, a pay boost for wildland firefighters approved in 2021 was just permanently signed into law.

U.S. lawmakers avoided a government shutdown Friday night after they approved the “American Relief Act” federal budget. As part of the government funding, it also approved the 2025 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which boosted firefighter pay.

The act increases wildland firefighters’ special hourly base rates depending on an employee’s GS, or General Schedule, level. The increases include:

It also requires firefighters to receive premium pay for instances when they’re deployed to wildfires. The daily pay is equal to 450% of one hour’s wages when they’re responding to an incident outside of their official duties or assigned to a separate fire camp.

The pay boost has been a source of anxiety for the nation’s wildland firefighting force not long after the Biden Administration approved a $20,000 retention bonus in 2021. The bonus was only supplemental and legislators intended to enact a permanent pay increase.

That boost wasn’t made into reality until Friday night, majorly due to the legislative and lobbying efforts of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters advocacy group.

“I feel comforted by the fact that House Republicans included the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act in the House Interior Appropriations bill and that the Senate is there to match right alongside,” Jonathon Golden, a member of Grassroots, previously told WildfireToday. “My thought is that when we see a final Fiscal Year 2025 budget, we will also see some version of WFPPA that will make into law a higher pay for wildland firefighters.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: After years of anxiety, U.S. wildland firefighter pay boost may finally become permanent in 2025

The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s top official announced Wednesday the agency will start the process of changing a decade-old rule with the hopes of increasing prescribed burns.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, appointed earlier this year by President Donald Trump, said he has asked staff to specifically revisit the agency’s Exceptional Events Rule, which Zeldin claims has partially stood in the way of communities increasing their prescribed burning efforts.

The rule has long held prescribed burning in a gray area. The policy allows states to be exempt from meeting national air quality standards during “exceptional events,” or times of high pollution readings that states can’t control, like wildfires. However, a study published in February said prescribed fires may not always meet the exemption.

Since the practice is human-caused, is likely to recur, and is preventable, the current EPA policy would disqualify them as “exceptional events” and may lead to federal violations and financial penalties for states, according to the researchers. For this reason, EPA staff said that prescribed burns are virtually never nominated for exclusion under the rule.

“The relevant parts of the rule are very complex, but, to simplify, they indicate that if a prescribed burn complies with certain regulations and standard practices, it will be deemed by the agency to be “not reasonably controllable or preventable” and classified as a “natural” rather than “human-caused” event, such that the “unlikely to recur” requirement no longer applies,” the study said. To qualify, prescribed burns must comply with smoke management plans that reduce pollution effects and multiyear land resource management plans that set the frequency and location of burns. These requirements are quite complex and potentially burdensome.”

Zeldin affirmed that prescribed fires are necessary to protect communities from future catastrophic wildfires, but it’s unclear what changes he could make to the rule in order to increase prescribed burn activity. The EPA could have outright excluded as prescribed fires from the Exceptional Event Rule, but doing so may have incentivized states to avoid such burns and, instead, risk wildfires that are already exempt, the researchers said.

“As air quality standards are tightened, and as efforts are made to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire on the landscape, it is possible that emissions from prescribed fires could have increased implications for nonattainment status,” the study said. “Indeed, the recent rulemaking process that lowered the annual PM2.5 standard raised significant concern within the forest management community over potential constraints the revised standard might impose on use of prescribed fire.”

The United States Department of Agriculture on Tuesday announced each of the 6,000 probationary employees it had terminated since Feb. 13 now has their job back, the department said in a press release.

“By Wednesday, March 12, the Department will place all terminated probationary employees in pay status and provide each with back pay, from the date of termination,” USDA’s statement said. “The Department will work quickly to develop a phased plan for return-to-duty, and while those plans materialize, all probationary employees will be paid.”

The Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent federal court that focuses on government employee complaints, issued a stay order against the USDA on March 5. The Board ordered the reinstatement of every position terminated within the department since Feb. 13 to be reinstated for at least 45 days, on the grounds that USDA’s mass and indiscriminate termination was likely unlawful.

Wednesday, March 12, was the deadline for the USDA to submit proof it had complied with the Board’s order.

USDA’s mass firing on Feb. 13 included thousands of federal land employees, around 75% of which had secondary wildland fire duties, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Vice President Riva Duncan, who obtained the numbers from the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Wildland Fire division.

“While ‘primary firefighters’ were exempt, the positions that were cut made some pretty huge contributions to operational wildland fire,” Duncan said. “For example, eastern national forests rely much more heavily on these collateral duty folks to do a lot of prescribed burning and initial attack of wildfires…There were people working the LA fires who, because it was the offseason, weren’t primary fire but were filling in on engines and crews.”