Scientists warn the warming world is stretching wildfire-fighting efforts thin. A recently released study raises serious concerns about the stress that overlapping wildfire seasons in different parts of the world puts on the sharing of firefighting personnel and equipment.
"We've hit that limit a number of years, where we run out of resources and we have to say no," Washington State Forester George Geissler told The New York Times. "You can only fight so much fire."
The overheating planet has led to a sharp rise in the number of days of extreme fire weather conditions compared to the late 1970s. The study published in the journal Science Advances found that rising temperatures means wildfire seasons in more and more regions of the world are occurring simultaneously. "The pressure is real and here, now," Geissler warned.
The study revealed that North America, Europe, Boreal Asia, the Middle East, and South America experience the most frequent simultaneous fire weather across regions, with at least one other area affected on the same day for over 30 days annually.
The authors of the study used the term "synchronous fire weather" to describe situations wherein extreme fire weather strikes multiple regions simultaneously, increasing the chance of widespread fires and their impacts on human health and the environment.
"Significant increases in SFW occurred during 1979 to 2024, with more than a twofold increase observed in most regions," they wrote. "We estimate that over half of the observed increase is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"Currently, regions such as Europe and Southeast Asia, and fire-prone countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, have established bilateral and multilateral firefighting cooperation systems, which have been effective in managing recent major wildfires," observed Cong Yin, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Merced and Chinese Academy of Sciences and one of the study's authors. "However, when extreme fire weather happens in many places at once, it increases the likelihood of widespread fire outbreaks and strains firefighting capacity, because crews, aircraft, and equipment can't be easily shared when everyone needs help at the same time.
"A key takeaway is that the growing overlap in fire-danger seasons can shrink the 'window' when countries or regions can effectively support each other. For example, the United States and South Africa average four same-day extreme fire weather days per year, increasing by 1.2 days per decade."
A different study on wildfires, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just a day after the study on converging wildfire seasons, concluded that finding a way to cool down the planet could save a significant number of lives.
The study, titled "Valuing wildfire smoke-related mortality benefits from climate mitigation," was led by Stanford University. "We find that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level can reduce smoke-related mortality in the United States by 11,600 each year compared to 3 C," the researchers concluded. "We estimate that every ton of CO2 emitted leads to damage of $11.2 from smoke-related mortality in the United States, which increases the U.S. social cost of carbon by 74% relative to existing nonwildfire damage estimates."
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