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Data update—Wildfires

June 23

How much land is being burned by wildfires, and how is this changing over time?

Wildfires occur all over the world, and can be hard to measure consistently. To track their numbers and size, we can use a single, global vantage point: satellites.

That’s the approach the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) takes. They partner with NASA, whose satellites take images of the entire Earth's surface every 1–2 days, to estimate burned area for all countries and regions.

GWIS provides both a long-term view, with annual data since 2002, and a near real-time view, with weekly data up to June 2026. I recently updated our charts with the latest annual and weekly data.

GWIS also includes breakdowns by land cover type — forests, savannas, croplands, and more — so you can see both how much land is burning and what type.

While satellites are a consistent way to track wildfires at the global level, they do have limitations.

They tend to underestimate the true burned area because they often miss small fires and those obscured by cloud cover or tree canopy.

They also don’t know why vegetation burned: the estimates capture all vegetation fires, so they can include some planned or agricultural burning alongside uncontrolled wildfires.

Most cropland burning is too small-scale for these satellites to see, but some of it is captured, and is not what many people would think of as strictly wildfires.

Explore the updated data in our interactive charts
Stacked area chart of total annual wildfire area burned globally by land-cover type, where it shows contributions from shrublands and grasslands, savannas, forests, croplands, and other land across 2002 to 2024. The chart shows shrublands/grasslands and savannas dominate the burned area and total annual burned area fluctuates around 300 million to 450 million hectares with noticeable year-to-year variation. Source: Global Wildfire Information System (2026). License: CC BY. Note: estimates rely on the NASA MCD64 MODIS sensor and may underestimate burned areas and fire occurrences.
Veronika Samborska