Bars over time
World Burned Area
Land area burned worldwide each year, million hectares
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Global Wildfire Information System, European Commission Joint Research Centre (CC BY 4.0), from NASA MODIS MCD64A1 satellite burned-area maps. MODIS undercounts small fires and misses burns hidden by cloud, smoke or forest canopy. Palanor converted hectares to millions of hectares. Counts wildfires, farm and pasture burning, and prescribed burns alike.
How much of the planet’s land burns each year, mapped from satellites. Most of it is African savanna and grassland burnt in the dry season, so the world total moves with Africa more than with the forest fires that make headlines.
What this chart reads
- World Burned Area (GWIS)as “Burned area”latest 2025-12-31
Sources
World Burned Area (GWIS). Source: Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), European Commission Joint Research Centre, Copernicus Emergency Management Service: country profiles (gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/country.profile), based on NASA MODIS MCD64A1. Licence: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Changes made by Palanor: hectares converted to millions of hectares.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.