'Only the beginning': Increase in wildfires heavily linked to climate change, study finds

A new study strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land destroyed by wildfires over the past two decades in the western U.S., and one researcher says the trend is likely to worsen in the years to come.

"I am afraid that the record fire seasons in recent years are only the beginning of what will come due to climate change, and our society is not prepared for the rapid increase of weather contributing to wildfires in the American West," Rong Fu, study co-author and University of California, Los Angeles, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, said in a news release.

The increasing destructiveness of wildfires is shown by U.S. Geological Survey data. Between 1984 to 2000, the average burned area across 11 western states was nearly seven thousand square kilometres per year. For the next 17 years, through 2018, the average burned area was approximately 13.5 thousand square kilometres per year.

In 2020, according to a U.S. National Interagency Coordination Center report, the amount of land burned by wildfires in the American West reached 35.6 thousand square kilometres -- an area larger than the state of Maryland.

By comparison, British Columbia had its worst wildfire season in history in 2018, during which about 13.5 thousand square kilometres of land was burned. That broke the previous record set a year earlier, when approximately 12.2 thousand square kilometres of land was scorched.