For millennia, fire was humanity's greatest tool. Today, it’s one of our greatest threats. Recovering control will require learning from the past while confronting the political choices of the present.
Of all the traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from every other creature on Earth, none has been more consequential than our relationship with fire.
We are the only species that can control, sustain and deliberately start fires — and we have been doing so for an extraordinarily long time. Fossil and archaeological evidence suggests that our near-ancestor Homo erectus was already transporting burning material from one site to light fires elsewhere as far back as 1.5 million years ago. The ability to actually ignite fire on demand appears to have emerged some 400,000 years ago.
The consequences were profound. Cooking food expanded and enriched the human diet, reducing the energy cost of digestion and freeing metabolic resources for brain development. Controlled fire cleared insects, drove away predators and transformed hunting. Fire fertilized fields through slash-and-burn clearing, and it forged weapons. By the time cities emerged, fire had already shaped how people lived for millennia.
In the industrial age, fire continued to transform human society. Steam engines, locomotives, internal combustion engines and jet turbines are all fire in mechanical forms. Today, fire in its myriad modern guises powers nearly everything: a natural gas burner on the stove, a diesel generator in a hospital, the fossil fuel-fired data center that houses servers running artificial intelligence models. A species that once mastered fire to survive on the savanna now burns fossil fuels at a rate that is remaking the planet's atmosphere.
But ironically, in the era many scientists call the Anthropocene — the age of human dominance — it appears that humanity may be losing control of its defining technology.
A Planet on Fire: Alarming Trends
The numbers are stark. Data from WRI's Global Nature Watch (formerly, Global Forest Watch) confirms that fires are burning more than twice as much tree cover globally as they did just two decades ago — a trend that has persisted for at least three years. In 2025 alone, fire accounted for 42% of the 25.5 million hectares of tree cover lost worldwide, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom, according to analysis from the University of Maryland's GLAD Lab.
There was some cautiously encouraging news in 2025: Tropical primary forest loss fell 36% from the record-shattering levels of 2024, partly reflecting decisive government action in countries like Brazil. But experts are clear-eyed about what that decline means. Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of WRI's Global Forest Watch, notes that part of the decline simply reflects a statistical lull after an extreme fire year. With El Niño conditions — possibly very strong ones — set to return in mid-2026, the underlying trajectory remains deeply worrying, with parts of Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia and Canada at greatest fire risk. It’s also important to note that healthy moist tropical forests do not burn on their own. Unlike some forests and grasslands, where fire is a natural ecosystem feature, rainforest fires are almost always sparked by human activity, including fragmentation that creates canopy gaps and edges that weaken resistance to fire.
Figures from 2024 underscore why. Fires fueled by Brazil's worst drought on record caused 66% of that country's primary forest loss — more than 6 times the share in 2023. The feedback dynamics involved are precisely what climate scientists have long warned: Hotter and drier conditions created by a warming climate make forests more combustible, while burning forests release carbon that further accelerates warming. Current trends suggest this dangerous “feedback loop” is gaining momentum.
Meanwhile, the forest conservation target to reverse forest loss by 2030 that more than 140 countries committed to in 2021 remains far out of reach. Current loss rates are roughly 70% too high to be on track.
Beyond tropical forests, the broader fire picture is equally alarming. The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season burned over 18 million hectares, killed dozens of people and wiped out nearly 3 billion animals. The 2023 Canadian wildfire season was the worst in recorded history. The 2025 Los Angeles fires destroyed entire neighborhoods and caused economic damage in the tens of billions of dollars. These events — once extraordinary — are becoming the norm.
Two Paths to Regain Control of Forest Fires
The concept of hazard versus risk is central to how firefighters and forest managers think. Hazard refers to the conditions that make fire likely to start and spread — dry vegetation, strong winds, temperatures elevated by climate change or other factors. Risk focuses on people: where they live, how land is managed, and what economic and political incentives shape those choices. Hazard is increasingly driven by forces — climate change, drought — that no single country or community fully controls (though many contribute through activities that spew greenhouse gas emissions). But risk is, in principle, entirely within our power to reduce. That distinction points toward two interconnected paths to regaining humanity’s control over fire.
Path One: Learning from Those Who Never Forgot
For most of human history, fire was a tool to be wielded with knowledge, precision and care — not an enemy to be suppressed. Indigenous and traditional communities across every inhabited continent developed sophisticated fire management systems that adapted to local ecologies, seasonal rhythms and the particular fire behavior of specific landscapes. This knowledge was not primitive or accidental. It was refined empirically, passed down through generations and embedded in cultural practice.
Colonialism largely dismantled these systems. In California, Spanish missionaries punished Indigenous people for setting fires as early as 1793; that prohibition was renewed by the state legislature in 1850. In Australia, British settlers actively suppressed Aboriginal burning, viewing it as evidence that Indigenous peoples did not truly “occupy” the land — a legal and moral claim that justified dispossession. Across Africa, colonial administrations systematically criminalized traditional fire practices that had maintained savanna ecosystems for thousands of years.
As a recent analysis in the Journal of Environmental Management documents, the suppression of Indigenous fire management has had lasting ecological consequences that we are only now beginning to fully reckon with — everything from higher catastrophic fire risk to habitat alteration and associated collapse of entire populations of species.
The evidence for reviving Indigenous-led fire management is compelling. Research from WRI and WWF-Australia finds that Indigenous-managed lands — which are disproportionately affected by wildfires — consistently lose less tree cover, store more carbon and support greater biodiversity than surrounding areas when communities have genuine authority over fire management.
For example, the Charagua Iyambae, a newly established Indigenous territory in southern Bolivia, helped prevent the spread of forest fires for two years in a row by investing in early warning systems and enforcement of land use-policies.
The Yurok, Karuk and Hupa nations of Northern California have been slowly winning the right to resume cultural burning after more than a century of suppression. Results show that traditional burning reduces fuel loads and can prevent the catastrophic crown fires that have devastated the region in recent years. In Australia, Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land have developed a savanna fire management program that both reduces emissions and generates carbon credits — a model that has attracted significant interest from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
This is sometimes called “decolonizing fire” — a term that acknowledges historical injustice and the practical project of restoring Indigenous authority over fire management on their lands. It is not nostalgia. It recognizes that knowledge systems refined over thousands of years, in place-based relationships with specific landscapes, contain unique ecological insight. The task is to combine that ancient wisdom with the tools of modern science — geospatial monitoring, fire behavior modeling, carbon accounting — in ways that respect Indigenous leadership rather than subordinate it.
Of course, the world of the 21st century is not the world in which traditional fire practices evolved. Climate change is shifting fire seasons, making conditions hotter and drier in ways that require adaptation of time-tested techniques. California's Tribal nations, for example, have already adjusted the timing of their cultural burns as safe burning windows now occur later in the year than traditional practice. The goal is not to freeze traditional knowledge in amber, but to let it evolve in partnership with communities that hold it — with the legal standing, resources and political recognition they need to do so.
Path Two: Confronting the Political Economy of Fire
The second path is harder because it requires changing political and economic structures that have made fire catastrophe more likely. Fire does not simply happen: In most cases, it is set — deliberately for land clearing, or accidentally through negligence — or it is allowed to spread through failures of governance and land management. Understanding why fires are getting worse requires understanding who benefits from the conditions that produce them.
Agricultural expansion remains the leading driver of tree cover loss globally; fire is frequently the tool of choice for that expansion. In the Brazilian Amazon, arson is often the first instrument of land conversion — clearing forest to establish a claim to the land in a place where property rights are contested and law enforcement is weak. That lays the groundwork for establishing cattle ranches, soy farms and more. In Indonesia, peatland damaged by drought and poorly managed oil palm and pulpwood cultivation creates dried-out landscapes with extraordinary fire risks. In Central and West Africa, poorly governed forest frontiers invite charcoal production and smallholder encroachment that systematically fragment fire-resilient forests into fire-prone mosaics.
Commodity markets drive much of this. Global demand for soy, beef, palm oil and wood creates economic incentives for forest conversion that overwhelm the conservation signals from carbon markets and voluntary commitments. Subsidies to both commodity production and extractive industries like mining further tilt the playing field. Weak or indeterminate land tenure, particularly the failure to formally recognize and enforce Indigenous and community land rights, leaves forests legally unprotected and therefore exposed to opportunistic clearing. And corruption by powerful actors undermines enforcement even where laws exist on paper.
These are not forces of nature. They are policy choices, and they can be changed.
Stronger enforcement of existing forest protection laws, greater investment in fire prevention and suppression, land tenure for Indigenous and forest communities, fiscal reform that eliminates perverse agricultural subsidies to deforestation-linked industries, and supply chain due diligence requirements — such as the EU Deforestation Regulation — are all tools that address the political economy of fire rather than just its ecological symptoms. So is meaningful nature and climate finance that makes forest protection economically competitive with forest conversion.
None of these interventions are straightforward. All of them require confronting well-organized interests that profit from the status quo. But the alternative is a future in which fire management is an endless, losing struggle.
Fire As Ally, Not Enemy
The goal is not a world without fire. Fire is not an aberration in terrestrial ecosystems — it is a fundamental ecological process, as native to fire-adapted savannas, Mediterranean shrublands and boreal forests as rain. Many of these ecosystems require periodic burning to maintain the biological diversity and structural complexity that make them resilient. The catastrophic fires we are witnessing are evidence that we have significantly disrupted the fire regimes that healthy ecosystems — and healthy human communities — depend on.
Regaining control means restoring fire to something closer to its proper ecological role: frequent, low-intensity, place-based and deliberately managed — rather than catastrophic, uncontrolled and driven by decades of accumulated fuel from overly strict fire suppression practices and other human disruptions such as forest fragmentation due to road building. That is what Indigenous fire practitioners have known for millennia and what the scientific literature is increasingly confirming. It also means reducing the human-driven pressures — in agricultural policy, in land governance, in fossil-fuel-based energy systems — that are pushing the climate toward conditions in which no fire management strategy will be effective.
The two paths are not separate. Traditional ecological knowledge and community governance of fire need the enabling political and economic environment that gives them a chance to work. Policy reform and institutional change need the deep, place-based knowledge that makes fire management ecologically effective rather than just administratively tidy. They must be pursued together, at scale, with the urgency that a planet increasingly on fire demands.
Humanity did not master fire by accident. We mastered it through observation, experiment, knowledge sharing, and — crucially — social institutions that governed its use. We can do so again. But only if we are honest about what we have lost, why we lost it, and what it will take to respond and recover.