Wildfires are getting more intense around the world due to human-driven climate change

由于人为驱动的气候变化，世界各地的野火变得更加严重

Earth just endured one of its most extreme wildfire years on record — and scientists say human-driven climate change is the cause.

地球刚刚经历了有记录以来最极端的野火年之一——科学家称人为驱动的气候变化是其中的原因。

A sweeping new analysis, the State of Wildfires 2024–25 report, finds that human-driven global warming dramatically increased the intensity and scale of wildfires across the globe, in some regions making severe fire seasons 25 to 35 times more likely than they would have been in a cooler world.

一项全新的分析，即《2024-25年野火状况报告》发现，人为驱动的全球变暖极大地增加了全球野火的强度和规模，在一些地区，发生严重火灾季节的可能性比更冷的世界高出25至35倍。

The international study combines satellite data, weather reanalysis and land-surface models to show how heat, drought and vegetation changes converged into record-breaking fires from the Amazon to California.

这项国际研究结合了卫星数据、天气再分析和地表模型，展示了从亚马逊到加利福尼亚的高温、干旱和植被变化是如何演变成破纪录的火灾的。

"Land surface models simulate how climate, vegetation and fire interact across the Earth’s surface," Douglas Kelley, a land surface modeler at the U.K. Center for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and a co-lead of the State of Wildfires annual report, told Space.com. Kelley and his collaborators used two approaches to study the impacts of global wildfires, first running thousands of simulations of past fire seasons with and without the effects of human-driven climate change. Then, they looked at models of the Earth's vegetation to see how the growth and death of plants can produce fuel for wildfires. "Together, these approaches show both how climate change has already influenced major fire events, and what the future might hold,” Kelley said.

英国生态与水文中心（UKCEH）的地表建模师、国家野火年度报告的共同负责人道格拉斯·凯利告诉Space.com：“地表模型模拟了气候、植被和火灾在地球表面的相互作用。” 凯利和他的合作者使用两种方法来研究全球野火的影响，首先对过去的火灾季节进行了数千次模拟，无论是否受到人为驱动气候变化的影响。然后，他们观察了地球植被的模型，以了解植物的生长和死亡如何为野火提供燃料。凯利说：“这些方法共同表明了气候变化已经如何影响重大火灾事件，以及未来可能发生的情况。”

The team calculated that, from March 2024 through February 2025, wildfires burned 1.4 million square miles (3.7 million square kilometers), an area larger than the size of India.

该团队计算出，从2024年3月到2025年2月，野火烧毁了140万平方英里（370万平方公里），面积比印度还大。

Certain regions saw truly staggering spikes. Fire emissions were higher than normal, with Bolivia seeing its highest carbon dioxide emissions total of this century (771 million tons), while Canada had its second year of reaching over a billion tons its CO2 emissions. Brazil's Pantanal region, considered the world's largest wetland, had six times the average carbon dioxide emissions for the area.

某些地区出现了惊人的峰值。火灾排放量高于正常水平，玻利维亚的二氧化碳排放量达到本世纪最高水平（7.71亿吨），而加拿大的二氧化碳排放量已连续第二年超过10亿吨。巴西的潘塔纳尔地区被认为是世界上最大的湿地，其二氧化碳排放量是该地区平均水平的六倍。

As carbon dioxide helps contribute to greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, these emission increases are helping to propel a positive feedback loop, driving up global warming conditions even further, which, in turn, can lead to more extreme wildfires.

由于二氧化碳有助于增加大气中的温室气体，而这些排放量的增加有助于推动正反馈循环，就会进一步加剧全球变暖状况，进而可能导致更极端的野火。

The most powerful finding for the team was how clear climate change emerged as a variable in driving the intensity of the wildfire seasons worldwide.

该团队最有力的发现是，气候变化是如何成为推动全球野火季节强度的一个变量。

"Wildfires are shaped by a tangled mix of weather, vegetation, land use and chance — factors that usually make event-scale attribution incredibly difficult. To fully reflect that complexity, we pushed our methods to explore thousands of different ways that climate, people, and ecosystems might interact to influence fire," Kelley said.

凯利说“野火是由天气、植被、土地利用和偶然因素的复杂组合形成的，这些因素通常使事件规模的归因变得极其困难。为了充分反映这种复杂性，我们推动我们的方法来探索气候、人类和生态系统可能相互作用而影响火灾的数千种不同方式，”。

"Yet across all those possibilities, the conclusion barely wavered: human-driven climate change increased the likelihood of these extreme fires and amplified how much land burned...The science has now advanced to the point where the climate signal is unmistakable. But worryingly, climate change itself has advanced so far that this signal is visible in every extreme fire event we assessed,” Kelley said.

“然而，在所有这些可能性中，结论几乎没有动摇：人为驱动的气候变化增加了这些极端火灾的可能性，并增加了烧毁的数量土地的面积……科学现在已经发展到气候信号明确无误的程度。但令人担忧的是，气候变化本身已经发展到如此严重的程度，以至于我们评估的每一次极端火灾事件中都可以看到这一信号，”凯利说。

Wildfires in 2024 and 2025 killed more than 200 people worldwide, including 100 people in Nepal, 34 people in South Africa and 30 people in Los Angeles. The Southern California blazes alone forced 150,000 evacuations and caused an estimated $140 billion in damages. Similarly, fires in Canada's Jasper National Park alone cost over US $1 billion in damages while Brazil's Pantanal’s agribusiness sector lost over $200 million due to wildfires.

2024年和2025年的野火导致全球200多人死亡，其中尼泊尔100人，南非34人，洛杉矶30人。仅南加州大火就迫使15万人撤离，并造成了约1400亿美元的损失。同样，仅加拿大贾斯珀国家公园的火灾就造成了超过10亿美元的损失，而巴西潘塔纳尔的农业综合企业部门因野火损失了超过2亿美元。

Besides carbon emissions, air quality impacts were also significant. Fine particulate pollution from fires in Brazil reached up to 60 times higher than the World Health Organization’s safe limits, exposing hundreds of millions of people to toxic smoke.

除了碳排放，空气质量的影响也很大。巴西火灾造成的细颗粒物污染高达世界卫生组织安全限值的60倍，使数亿人暴露在有毒烟雾中。

For scientists, much of this evidence comes from low-Earth orbit. Satellites such as NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites have become indispensable for detecting active fires, mapping burn scars and monitoring atmospheric pollution from smoke plumes.

对于科学家来说，这些证据大部分来自近地轨道。美国国家航空航天局的Terra和Aqua卫星等卫星已成为探测活跃火情、绘制烧过火区域疤痕图和监测烟羽造成的大气污染不可或缺的工具。

Those space-based observations fed directly into the State of Wildfires analysis, which used them to validate fire-weather models and quantify how much climate change has altered conditions on the ground.

这些天基观测数据被直接纳入了野火状况分析中，该分析利用这些数据验证火灾天气模型并量化气候变化对地面状况的改变程度。

The research team says future versions of the report will rely even more heavily on upcoming hyperspectral sensors and next-generation Earth observation satellites, which can track vegetation dryness, fuel loads and even early-stage ignition events in near real time.

研究团队表示，该报告的未来版本将更加依赖即将投入使用的高光谱传感器和新一代地球观测卫星，这类设备能够近乎实时地跟踪植被干燥程度、燃料负载甚至早期的起火事件。

For researchers like Kelley, the question then becomes: what can humanity do about it?

对于像凯利这类的研究人员来说，问题就变成了：人类对此能做些什么？

"We touch on this in our summary for policymakers, especially around climate finance and how wildfires affect nature-based climate solutions. However, we haven’t yet been in a position to explore in depth how local fire management decisions influenced each event: what worked, what didn’t, and what we can learn. Advances in scientific methods and ongoing study time will enable us to do this, and it's a key area for future work," said Kelley.

凯利说：“我们在给政策制定者的总结中谈到了这一点，特别是围绕气候融资以及野火如何影响基于自然的气候解决方案。然而，我们目前无法深入探索当地火灾管理决策如何影响每个事件：什么有效，什么无效，以及我们可以学到什么。科学方法的进步和持续开展的研究将使我们能够做到这一点，而这也是未来研究的一个关键领域，”。