Historic fire seasons are the 'new normal' without 'serious action' on climate change

Elizabeth Goldman is a co-director of Global Nature Watch, previously known as Global Forest Watch, a database measuring forest loss that's frequently cited in Mongabay reporting. She joins this week's podcast to detail GNW's updated 25-year analysis of global forest fire trends. The picture is stark: Forest fires burn twice as much forest today as they did 20 years ago, and historic fire seasons are the "new normal," she says.

"Catastrophic, large-scale fires are becoming more of a normal. The last three years are the worst three years in the record-keeping in our data set," Goldman says. "Fires now burn twice as much forest as they did earlier in the time series from our data."

2025, considered a drop from 2024, still saw 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of forest, an area roughly the size of Guatemala, burn. Rhett Butler, founder and CEO of Mongabay, published an analysis of the dip in 2025, cautioning readers against reading too much into what appeared to be a reprieve. He noted that large-scale commodity agriculture and climate change, the causes of this forest loss, remain. Goldman agrees.

In the absence of "serious action" internationally to combat it, and commodity-driven agriculture that continues contributing to these fires, Goldman says there are things governments can do to mitigate their risk locally.

"There are ways to sustainably manage a forest, like through thinning and prescribed burns, fire breaks, those sorts of things that don't involve clear-cutting an entire forest, but leave the tree standing, leave the healthy ecosystem there, but are still kind of managing the fuel load," she says.

Sustainable management and strengthening Indigenous rights and resources is another cited need, Goldman says, a point raised in a previous Newscast conversation with Erica Gies, who reported on the work of forestry scientist Suzanne Simard.

"Results show that 60% coverage really does maintain a lot of the complexity of the forest and those forest relationships and a healthy hydrology, keeping the land from drying … in some ecosystems it seems like 30% might be enough, but definitely clear-cutting seems to not be sustainable," Gies said in that conversation.

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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Banner image: Pine forest and granite in the Sierra Nevada. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Time codes

(00:00) We are 'not on track' to solve this problem

(08:31) Boreal regions bear the brunt

(12:34) Tropical fires are almost entirely human made

(15:44) What can be done right now?

(24:51) Urban wildfires 'potentially' likely to continue