State of Wildfires 2023/24: Key Findings and Future Directions relevant to the Global Carbon Budget

The 2023/24 fire season was marked by unprecedented fire extent and carbon emissions in Canada, deadly fast-moving fires in Hawaii, Greece and Chile, choking wildfire smoke in the Amazon, and the largest wildfire on record in the European Union. Against this backdrop, we introduce the inaugural State of Wildfires report, an annual scientific report that consolidate state-of-the-art scientific understanding of the drivers and impacts of extreme wildfires and provides crucial insights to policymakers, disaster management services, land managers, and wider society to inform approaches to mitigation, preparedness, and adaption.

The report identifies and catalogues extreme wildfire events of the 2023/24 fire season and describes their societal and environmental impacts. For a select number of events that attracted significant attention, both internationally and within their respective countries, we pinpoint the bioclimatic and societal factors influencing their occurrence, assess their predictability based on available forecasting systems, attribute their occurrence to anthropogenic climate change and land use factors, and predict future change in the probability of similar events occurring in the coming century. We also provide a regional outlook on the 2024/25 fire season. The State of Wildfires report embodies a critical step forward in consolidating fire science, advocating for advancements in wildfire mitigation and adaptation strategies, and enhancing societal resilience against the growing threat of wildfires in a changing climate.

At ICDC11, we will present results from the inaugural of the State of Wildfires and highlight goals for its future development, which include a more detailed assessment of carbon emissions and post-fire recovery fluxes and a more granular attribution of burned area and carbon emission to climate change, natural climate variability, and land use/land management factors.