The Shocking Size of the Australian Wildfires

The devastating California wildfires of 2018 and last year’s fires in Siberia made international headlines and shocked the world, but in terms of size they are far smaller than the current catastrophic bushfire crisis in Australia, where approximately 12.4 million acres have been burned to date. In California, there were 100 lives lost in 2018 despite the smaller size of the fires. Fires in remote parts of northern Russia burned 6.7 million acres last year - a lot more than was expected in an average year -, but no casualties were reported in the sparsely populated region.

Other than in Northern hemisphere countries, Australia is right now in the middle of its fire season. Ongoing heat and drought are expected to fan the flames further. In the last week, shocking pictures of bright orange skies in Queensland and flames ripping through towns captured the world’s attention.

The bushfires grew more severe amidst a heatwave that saw Australia record its hottest day and simultaneously driest spring on record. New South Wales has been affected disproportionally, plunging Sydney into dark smoke in mid-December. A large share of the 12.4 million acres burned in the recent wildfires are located in the state.

Bushfires frequently occur in Australia, with some years bringing more severe destruction that others. Scientist are predicting that in connection to climate change, fires will become more frequent and more severe when they happen.

Other parts of Australia have also experienced wildfires (bringing the total count of burned acres to 26 million acres in 2019), but those Savannah fires common in the Northern part of the country have been neither catastrophic nor unusual, and are therefore excluded from the count for this chart.

Note: An earlier version of this graph included the size of catastrophic fires in the Amazon rain forest, but that figure has since been withdrawn by the source. 75 million acres burned in Brazil in total between January and November 2019, but because of problems dissecting prescribed burns, Savannah burns and catastrophic burns, the figure has been excluded. In neighboring Bolivia for example, 12 million acres burned in 2019, out of which 4.5 million acres affected forests and 0.5 million acres Amazonian rain forest.