World Burned Area (GWIS)

## What this measures

The land area burned in the world each calendar year, in millions of hectares (one million hectares is 10,000 square kilometres), as mapped from NASA's MODIS satellites and summed by the Global Wildfire Information System. It counts all burning: wildfires, agricultural and pasture burning, and prescribed burns.

## Why it matters

Burned area is the direct footprint of fire on land. It tracks drought, heat and land clearing, and it drives smoke, carbon emissions, insurance losses and damage to forests, farms and grazing land. Most of the area burned each year is tropical savanna and grassland in Africa, where fire is set routinely to clear land and renew pasture, so the world total moves mostly with African fire seasons.

## How to read it

The world burned 332.9 million hectares in 2025, the second-smallest area since the record began in 2002; the smallest was 330.5 million in 2022 and the largest 463.5 million in 2002. The yearly average fell from 439.4 million hectares in 2002–2011 to 356.7 million in 2016–2025. Higher means more land burned. Fire swings widely from year to year with rain, heat and fuel, so compare a year with the long-run average rather than with the year before, and read trends over a decade.

## What it does not say

MODIS sees fire through 500-metre pixels, so it undercounts small fires and misses burns hidden by cloud, smoke or forest canopy; national agencies that map fire perimeters from the ground and the air often report larger totals in big forest-fire years. The figure does not say what started a fire, how severe it was, or whether the land will recover. GWIS adds a year once it has processed it, and recent years can be revised.

## How it's built

GWIS sums NASA's MODIS MCD64A1 monthly burned-area map (collection 6) over the land area of every country and across land-cover classes (forest, shrubland, grassland and savanna, cropland, other), from 2002. Palanor reads the yearly total from the GWIS country-profile service, converts hectares to millions of hectares and dates each year to 31 December. A year is published only once all twelve months are in.

## 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.