Wildfire risk to heighten globally in 2026 due to ‘historic’ El Niño

Satellite imagery showing the difference from average sea surface temperatures at the equator in the tropical Pacific Ocean (depicted using various shades of red and orange for warmth) during the first week of June 2026, as compared with the baseline used by NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch. (Image credit: NOAA Satellites )

A potentially historic El Niño is all but confirmed for 2026, heightening wildfire and other risks across the globe, according to recent reports from the world’s forecasting agencies.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has determined that an El Niño event this year was “virtually certain” based on all seasonal forecast modelling systems. The fluctuating water-temperature climate pattern of the tropical Pacific Ocean is also forecast to reach “unprecedented” intensity, compounding the high likelihood of wildfires in numerous regions worldwide.

Although usually associated with countries close to the Pacific, the impacts of this El Nino are predicted to extend far beyond, including into Europe, with heatwaves and drought more likely.

The last El Niño in 2023-24 was one of the five strongest on record and it played a role in record global temperatures registered in 2024. But no two El Nino events are the same. The full picture is complex and contains many variables as this graphic shows:

Major impacts and main climate effects of El Niño events. Sources: JRC analysis and Lenssen et al. (2020).

Extreme heat is set to build across the tropics and subtropics from September, and is expected to peak between December 2026 and February 2027, persisting into the spring, the agency said in a press release.

“Unusually warm weather is expected to spread across much of the world, with the warmth growing stronger as El Niño intensifies,” according to the release. “The regions most likely to feel this are in North and South America, Central America, Africa, the Euro-Asian continent and Australia.”

At the beginning of June, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization predicted the probability of El Niño through November to be close to or above 90%.

Two weeks later, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service declared it too, noting that in the US an El Nino tends to be stronger in winter months, with warmer than usual winters.

This map shows the typical impacts of El Nino to the continental U.S. and Canada during Northern Hemisphere winter. (Image credit: NOAA)
This map shows the typical impacts of El Nino to the continental U.S. and Canada during Northern Hemisphere winter. (Image credit: NOAA)

Last week, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology officially declared it. While predicting lower rainfall and higher temperatures over the current southern hemisphere winter the Bureau and other experts are cautious on the fire potential for the next summer.

“Large-scale climate drivers like El Niño can influence broad conditions such as temperature and rainfall, but they do not determine whether fires start or how they behave on the ground. Bushfires remain a complex, localised hazard that depend on whether the right conditions and an ignition coincide,” said CSIRO Principal Research Scientist Dr Andrew Sullivan.

“The relationship between El Niño and bushfire activity is not straightforward. The occurrence of an El Niño event does not translate directly into bushfire occurrence or impacts, and some of Australia’s more severe fire seasons have occurred in non-El Niño years.”

Global wildfire report for 2025 notes drop in area burned, as USAID cuts threaten future reports

Disastrous wildfires in Manitoba leave indigenous tribes without help.

Wildfires filled the headlines of 2025 from the US to South Korea to Spain and beyond, but an annual report shows that last year was actually one of the lowest fire years of this century.

At the global scale, land area burnt by wildfires in 2025 was nearly 828 million acres, which was the second-lowest on record since 2002 and around 16% below the average burned area of 2002 to 2024, according to the updated annual report published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. Last year also had the third-lowest total carbon dioxide emissions since 2002, around 12% below the 2002-2024 emissions average. And yet, wildfires killed more than 90 people and forced over 300,000 evacuations.

Researchers said the low burned area total in the midst of persistent extreme wildfires is a hallmark of our current era, especially in areas of social and economic inequality. The key points of the report included:

  • Emissions from Canada’s boreal forest wildfires from between 2023 and 2025 exceeded the combined emissions of the preceding 15 years
  • Los Angeles’ wildfires in January ranked as the fifth most costly natural disaster in world history
  • The United Kingdom experienced its first “megafire” exceeding 25,000 acres as wildfires throughout Europe were fueled by widespread drought and heat extremes

“A catalogue of extreme wildfires in 2025 continues to demonstrate that devastating consequences are not governed by area burned alone…Although the year’s most damaging events did not always coincide with exceptional total area burned, they produced acute societally disastrous outcomes,” the researchers said in the report. “Overall, the frequency of extreme fires in fuel-rich temperate and high-latitude systems, drought-driven fire activity in Europe, and disproportionate human impacts when extreme fires intersect with exposed communities are expected to further increase under continued warming.”

Researchers also warned that the database used in the report to establish the economic costs of major wildfires faces an “urgent finding crisis” following the cuts to USAID funding, according to the report’s lead author Matt Jones, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK. Scientists who rely on the database warn that the consequences of its loss would be practical, immediate, and damaging, and are asking the public for support through the signing of an open letter.

“In an era of intensifying climate extremes, cascading risks, and compounding crises, reliable data are not a luxury,” the scientists said. “They are the infrastructure for informed decision-making. Disaster risk reduction, early warning systems, anticipatory action, and climate adaptation all require credible historical baselines.”

Click here to read the full petition.

Only the most extreme climate models should be used to plan for future wildfire risk, study finds

Gospers Mountain Fire 2019 NSWRFS

The wildfire action plan signed by 50 nations at COP30 in Brazil this month may already be outdated, according to a newly released study.

Carbon project insurance company Artio used data from three major wildfire events from across the globe, specifically the 2020 Pantanal fires in Brazil, the Gospers Mountain fire during Australia’s Black Summer in 2019-2020, and the record-breaking 2020 wildfire season in the United States.

The firm found that the amount of area burned in each of the fires was only predicted by severe warming scenarios. More moderate climate warming scenarios missed around half of the land that ultimately burned during the incidents.

The finding underscores how projects working to lessen wildfire severity globally may already be outdated, according to Artio CEO and Co-Founder Bilal Hussain.

“The main risk is that projects are designed for a climate that no longer exists,” Hussain told Wildfire Today. “Using outdated assumptions can result in projects being sited in areas that are now far more fire-prone, threatening the permanence of stored carbon and the credibility of nature-based solutions as meaningful climate tools.”

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: 50 countries sign wildfire call to action at global climate summit

Hussain said that even the Wildfire agreement, recently signed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, relies on moderate climate outlooks than severe ones. The agreement recognizes that climate change is worsening fire risk and calls for stronger prevention and adaptation, but Hussain said it doesn’t reflect that our extreme reality is already the norm.

Officials should begin prioritizing regions with lower exposure to compound heat and drought, or those with naturally fire-adapted ecosystems that can recover without total biomass loss as a result of Artio’s study, according to Hussain. Adaptive fire management strategies should also be considered standard project design features, and risk models should be continuously updated to reflect ever-changing ground and climate conditions.

“Our study suggests that, for such frameworks to be effective, they must assume severe climate scenarios as the default and integrate the data driven tools and modelling now needed to plan for those conditions,” Hussain said.

Artio provides early-stage insurance for investments in carbon projects and is incorporated as a company in England and Wales.

Click here to see the study’s details.

Earlier, warmer spring ramps up Eastern Area fire season

The Jimmy’s Waterhole Fire in New Jersey was declared 100% contained on Thursday by the New Jersey Department of Forestry, having burned some 3900 acres, nearly half the state’s annual average in two days.

This and other regional fires prompts a visit to the Eastern Area Fire Environment Outlook to explore the conditions that led to the late April fire bust. On Friday’s Morning Briefing, the Eastern Area Coordination Center had nearly 40 percent of reporting units in Very High to Extreme Fire Danger, with the largest fires in New Jersey, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Rhode Island. In the past week, the region recorded 349 fires for 12,600 acres.

While spring is often active in the east — as forest fuels dry out between winter snow and rains and prior to green up —  the last week was drier throughout the Northeast and Midwest, as well as in the Great Plains and Southwest. Look south and you can spot the focused and incredible “purple” deluge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and to the north there’s an unusual heart-shaped moisture pattern in Michigan.

7-Day Percent of Normal Precipitation through April 14, 2023.

Spring in much of the East and Midwest was also warmer than normal …

… resulting in a 10-20 day earlier start to spring in the South and East, per the National Phenology Network. At least one location in New Jersey was tracked at 27 days early.

Fire activity in the region has been moving northeast toward Maine with the bubble of heat, including a fire point seemingly in the Atlantic — though a closer look at the Fire Weather Dashboard (with fire points activated) places the the fire on Martha’s Vineyard.

Soon, though, the spring fire season will be taking a hiatus, with greenup, increasing humidity, and even fog on the way. By Monday, moisture is expected in the East, with most predictive service areas transitioning to “Little or no risk.”

Fires around the world “have grown weirder”

Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, CO
Smoke column from the Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, Colorado, Aug. 15, 2020. USFS photo by Lauren Demos.

The Guardian has an excellent long-form article about wildland fires, titled ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder. Author Daniel Immerwahr writes that in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. He writes about fires around the world, pyrophobia, indigenous fire, and how hundreds of thousands die each year from such smoke-related maladies as strokes, heart failure and asthma.

Toward the end of the article he writes about fires in Indonesia where forests have been drained, burned, or clear cut, then summarizes.

Here is an excerpt:

…No single one of Indonesia’s many fires in recent decades has been especially noteworthy. But altogether they’ve been cataclysmic. In 1997, a dense haze of airborne particulates from Indonesia’s fires was perceptible as far as the Philippines and Thailand. That year, on Sumatra – centre of Indonesia’s fires – a commercial plane crashed due to poor visibility and killed all 234 aboard. The next day, two ships collided off the coast of Malaysia for the same reason, and 29 crew members died.

The economist Maria Lo Bue found that Indonesians who were toddlers during the 1997 haze grew less tall, entered school six months later and completed almost a year less of education than their peers. Another economist, Seema Jayachandran, found that the fires “led to over 15,600 child, infant and fetal deaths”, hitting the poor especially hard.

Picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate image is smoldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and you watch your daughter – short for her age – leave school a year early.

—

Fire is not in itself a bad thing. Many landscapes, built to burn, simply couldn’t exist without regular fires, either natural or intentional. Though foresters once sought to tamp blazes out everywhere, we now recognise that as a grave mistake. A fireproof planet isn’t something we can get, or should even want.

We badly need a healthier relationship to combustion. Rather than erratic, runaway fires, we need regular, restorative ones, like we used to have. Our forebears didn’t shun flame – they were relentless fire-setters. But they adhered to two important limits. First, they fed their fires with living vegetation, which reclaims lost carbon as it regrows. Second, they were guided by long-acquired experience with fire’s complex paths and consequences.

We’ve blasted far past both of those limits. We’re now burning fossilized vegetation, which sends carbon on a one-way trip to the warming atmosphere. And we’re kindling fires that bear little resemblance to the ones we’re used to. There’s no generational wisdom telling us what to do when we drain the peatlands of Central Kalimantan or let dry fuel pile up precariously in the California countryside, all while raising the temperature to hitherto unrecorded heights.

Books about fire typically end with prescriptions: we must invest in science, reclaim lost cultural knowledge, burn intentionally, build resiliently, and power our grids renewably. All that is true, surely. But given how complex fire is, and how unprecedented nearly everything we’re doing with it is, the best advice would seem to be: slow down. We have scrambled our landscape, changed our energy diet, altered the climate and revised our relationship to flame, all in a very short time. It’s not a surprise that fire, once a useful if obstinate companion to our species, has now slipped our grasp.

The world won’t burn up, as we sometimes imagine. But the fires of tomorrow will be different from those of yesterday, and we’re racing headlong into that unsettling future, burning tankfuls of gas as we go.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom.