A growing number of people globally are seeing wildfires encroach on their homes. That is not because wildfires are burning more land, however. Over the last two decades, the number of acres burned has dropped. The growing exposure to fires, a new study finds, is driven by the millions of people moving into fire-prone areas, mostly in Africa.
As warming fuels hotter, drier weather in much of the world, the most severe fires are growing more intense. But dramatic blazes, like the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles earlier this year, obscure another trend. From 2002 to 2021, the area scorched yearly by wildfires dropped by 26 percent globally, the study found. That trend is driven in large part by the proliferation of farms on the African savanna, which are breaking up wilderness and curbing the spread of large fires.
At the same time, the total number of people exposed to fires rose by nearly 40 percent. This shift too is tied to the growing number of farmers living on African drylands. The research, published in the journal Science, finds that today the vast majority of people exposed to wildfires, some 85 percent, live in Africa. A similar shift is underway in North America, where people are increasingly living at the edge of wilderness.
“Our work shows that wildfires really are becoming more frequent and intense in populated areas,” said coauthor Matthew Jones, of the University of East Anglia. “These changes bring danger to life, damage to property, and threat to livelihood.”
In some parts of the world, however, people are heading to safety. In Europe and Australia, a migration away from rural areas and into cities has curbed exposure to wildfires.
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