Extreme Wildfires
Fire seasons are lengthening and burning places that historically did not burn.
Severity score
66.7
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Warming, drought and land management failures have produced record fire seasons across Canada, Australia, the Mediterranean and Siberia. Smoke exposure causes far more deaths than the flames, reaching populations thousands of kilometres away, and burned boreal forest releases stored carbon.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
60Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
72People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
58Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
74Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
80Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Recent coverage
- 18 Aug 2026dw.comCan Germany teach Europe how to prevent wildfires?
- 10 Aug 2026youtube.comActive wildfire conditions worsen across U.S. West, including historic ...
- 10 Aug 2026weather.comPoor air quality continues to impact millions in West
- 10 Aug 2026youtube.com"Fire Climate" Making Wildfires Harder to Control - YouTube
- 10 Aug 2026youtube.comWildfire Disaster Spirals Across Greece As Emergency Crews Battle ...
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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