Africa accounts for more than 70% of the total area burned worldwide each year, earning it the label “the fire continent.” But forest fires and wildfires are not confined to one region. South America, Southeast Asia, boreal forests in Russia and Canada, and the Mediterranean basin all experience intense, recurring fire seasons driven by different combinations of climate, vegetation, and human activity.
Africa: The Fire Continent
Sub-Saharan Africa dominates global fire statistics by a wide margin. Between 6% and 8% of the continent’s land surface burns in a typical year, most of it across the vast savanna and grassland belts that stretch from West Africa through the Congo Basin periphery and down into southern Africa. These grassy ecosystems evolved with fire. Their growth cycles depend on burning every few years, which clears dead vegetation and stimulates new growth.
Tropical forests within Africa rarely burn on their own, but intense or repeated droughts, sometimes combined with land clearing, allow fire to push into forested areas. When that happens, the consequences for tree survival and forest composition can last decades. The sheer scale of African burning dwarfs every other continent, though much of it is low-intensity savanna fire rather than the high-severity crown fires that dominate headlines in North America or Australia.
South America: Amazon and Beyond
South America has emerged as one of the most fire-affected regions on the planet, particularly during dry seasons when agricultural burning overlaps with drought. During the 2024-2025 fire season, Bolivia recorded burned area 67,000 square kilometers above its historical average, a 169% increase and the greatest on record for the country. Brazil’s burned area was 59,000 square kilometers above average, making it the country’s third-highest fire season on record.
Much of this fire activity concentrates along the southern and eastern edges of the Amazon rainforest, where agriculture pushes into forested land. One of the largest recent fire zones sits at the tri-border area connecting Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. In Bolivia’s Santa Cruz region alone, burned area surpassed 1.14 million acres in a single season. Venezuela also recorded its second-highest burned area total, with an anomaly of 15,000 square kilometers above average. Dry-season burning to clear cropland is an annual event across the region, but climate variability is making the worst years significantly worse.
Boreal Forests: Russia and Canada
The boreal zone, the vast band of coniferous forest stretching across Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia, contains some of the most fire-prone landscapes on Earth. Russia and Canada together hold the majority of this forest, and their fire patterns differ in revealing ways.
In central Siberia, researchers documented an annual average of roughly 1,440 large fires per 100 million hectares of forest, burning about 1.89 million hectares per year. Western Canada, by comparison, averaged about 94 large fires per 100 million hectares, burning 0.56 million hectares. Russia’s large fire frequency was ten times greater, and its total area burned was three times higher. Canadian fires, however, tend to be individually larger (averaging nearly 6,000 hectares per fire versus about 1,300 in Russia) and burn more intensely.
Canada’s fire situation has escalated sharply. The 2023-2024 season broke national records, and the 2024-2025 season was the second highest on record immediately after, with burned area 21,000 square kilometers above average and carbon emissions more than triple the norm. Warming temperatures are lengthening fire seasons across the entire boreal zone, drying out soils and vegetation earlier in spring and later into fall.
Southeast Asia: Indonesia’s Peatland Fires
Indonesia’s tropical peatlands cover roughly 22,500 square kilometers, concentrated on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan. That represents about 8% of Indonesia’s land area but 36% of all tropical peatland globally. These carbon-rich soils, built up over thousands of years, become extraordinarily flammable when drained for agriculture or dried out by drought.
The most catastrophic fires occur during El Niño events, when reduced rainfall dries peatlands well below normal levels. The 1997 El Niño-driven fires, centered on Sumatra and Kalimantan, brought international attention to the problem as toxic haze blanketed much of Southeast Asia for months. During these extreme seasons, both surface vegetation and the peat soil itself catch fire, and underground peat fires can smolder for months, producing enormous volumes of smoke and carbon emissions. The Indian Ocean Dipole, a separate climate pattern, sometimes compounds the drying effect of El Niño, creating conditions for even more severe burning.
Mediterranean Europe
Southern Europe experiences a recurring wildfire season driven by hot, dry summers and landscapes full of fire-adapted vegetation. The western Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) consistently sees the highest concentration of large fires over 5,000 hectares. Greece, southern France, southern Italy, and Türkiye are also regularly affected.
Fire activity in this region has intensified in recent years. Portugal and Spain face a combination of rural depopulation (leaving forests unmanaged), eucalyptus plantations that burn readily, and increasingly extreme summer heat. Central and eastern Mediterranean countries, including Greece and Türkiye, have seen their own surges in large, fast-moving fires during heat waves. Ukraine and parts of the UK have also recorded unusual wildfire activity, reflecting how fire risk is expanding into areas that historically saw little of it.
North America: The Western United States and Mexico
The western United States has long been one of the most visible wildfire regions, with fire seasons affecting California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and the broader Rocky Mountain states. A century of fire suppression left many western forests unnaturally dense, creating conditions for larger, more severe fires when ignition occurs during dry conditions.
Mexico set a national record in 2024, experiencing more than 8,000 wildfires that burned over 16,500 square kilometers, the most since record-keeping began in 1998. Combined with Canada’s record-breaking seasons, North America as a whole is seeing fire activity push well beyond historical norms.
What Drives These Patterns
Three factors determine where fires concentrate globally. The first is climate: prolonged dry seasons, heat waves, and drought cycles like El Niño create the conditions for fire. The second is vegetation type. Savannas burn frequently but recover quickly. Boreal forests burn intensely but infrequently. Peatlands smolder for months. Each ecosystem has its own fire rhythm.
The third factor is human activity. Most fires globally are started by people, whether intentionally for land clearing or accidentally. In Africa and South America, agricultural burning is the primary ignition source. In the Mediterranean, arson and land management practices play significant roles. In boreal forests, lightning is a more common natural trigger, though human-caused ignition is increasing there as well. Climate change acts as an amplifier across all regions, extending dry seasons, intensifying droughts, and pushing fire into ecosystems that historically burned rarely or not at all.