"WASHINGTON — Earth’s nastiest and costliest wildfires are blazing four times more often now than they did in the 1980s because of human-caused climate change and people moving closer to wildlands, a new study found.

A study in the journal Science looks at global wildfires, not by acres burned which is the most common measuring stick, but by the harder to calculate economic and human damage they cause. The study concluded there has been a “climate-linked escalation of societally disastrous wildfires.”

A team of Australian, American and German fire scientists calculated the 200 most damaging fires since 1980 based on the percentage of damage to the country’s Gross Domestic Product at the time, taking inflation into account. The frequency of these events has increased about 4.4 times from 1980 to 2023, said study lead author Calum Cunningham, a pyrogeographer at the Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania in Australia."

Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press October 2, 2025. [2]