Last year was a ‘quiet’ one for wildfires. Catastrophic blazes in Canada, South Korea and LA still made it the costliest fire year in history

Last year’s fires took the costliest financial toll in recorded wildfire history, accounting for 38% of all insured losses related to natural hazards, according to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. That’s despite the fact the area burned by fires around the world was 16% below the long-term average of around 400 million hectares.

While low by recent standards, wildfires still burned around 335 million hectares of land last year, or 1.3 million square miles—about twice the size of Alaska. Fires also caused 90 fatalities globally, and forced around 300,000 evacuations, according to the study.

In some parts of the world,  wildfires, or lack thereof, was an unmitigated success story. In Africa, for instance, the rate of wildfire occurrence has declined dramatically in recent decades, as expanding agricultural activity encroached across natural savannahs and fragmented wild landscapes into plots of land less prone to burning. Similar trends have played out in Central Asian steppes and South American plains.

But in other parts of the world, fires are springing up with less warning and more ferocity—in many cases, directly threatening areas densely populated by humans. This has raised the risk of fires incurring heavy financial costs, and that of flare-ups engulfing people’s livelihoods.

“2025 shows that a ‘quiet’ fire year globally can still be devastating. We are seeing a growing disconnect between total area burned and real-world impacts, with risk increasingly determined by fire location, intensity, and exposure,” Matthew Jones, a physical geographer at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Fewer, but more ‘devastating’ blazes

That the world suffered fewer acres torched by wildfires in 2025 likely comes as little relief to the countries and cities that battled the infernos last year. 

Fires are migrating to higher latitudes as climate change prolongs heatwaves and drought conditions in more parts of the world. Higher temperatures combined with dense volumes of dry and flammable vegetation has raised the risk of even the smallest conflagrations quickly bellowing into unstoppable mega-fires. In the western U.S., climate change has been linked to a doubling in the number of large fires and extent of burned area over the past 40 years, according to a 2016 study published in the journal PNAS.

That means wildfires can rapidly escalate into generational events. The Palisades and Eaton fires that ripped through Los Angeles last year came in as one of the most destructive fire catastrophes in California’s history, forcing around 200,000 evacuations, razing down more than 18,000 structures, and causing up to 440 direct and indirect deaths, when factoring in health complications related to smoke inhalation.

The LA fires also came in as the fifth most costly natural disaster in history for insured losses, according to the most recent study. Total losses from the fires were worth $140 billion, of which $40 billion were insured.

Large fires in South Korea—where a record-smashing wildfire outbreak last spring charred around 250,000 acres—and in Europe–where fires collectively torched some 2.5 million acres—also caused dozens of deaths and forced mass evacuations. In Canada, last year ended as the second worst fire year in the country’s history, as a total of 6,000 fires torched around 22 million acres.

Fires are quickly emerging as one of the global economy’s biggest recurring pain points. Between 2014 and 2023, blazes caused around $106 billion in economic losses globally, including $74 billion in insured losses, according to a UN report on disaster risk published last year. Over the decade prior, insured losses from wildfires were under $10 billion.

The bulk of those financial costs are being absorbed by the U.S., home to nine of the 10 most expensive wildfire events since 1970, according to the UN report, calculated before California’s January 2025 wildfires could be accounted for. Other parts of the world, including several African countries, might be dealing with smaller total costs due to wildfires, but larger shares of uninsured losses that deal a heavier toll on local livelihoods.

“2025 illustrated the complex and uneven nature of climate-change impacts on wildfires. Although the year’s most damaging events did not always coincide with exceptional total area burned, they produced acute societally disastrous outcomes,” the recent study’s authors wrote. 

“Wildfires in 2025 continue to demonstrate that devastating consequences are not governed by area burned alone.”