Mirna Ines Fernandez, Third World Network
The surge in forest fires across the globe is no longer an occasional environmental tragedy—it has become a systemic crisis, intensifying year after year in the so-called fire season. In recent years, fire activity has intensified to unprecedented levels, exposing the fragility of both ecosystems and political will. Four of the five worst years for global forest fires have occurred since 2020.
The year 2024 marked an alarming record. Wildfires were responsible for 48% of all tropical primary forest loss in the Amazon and Congo Basin—regions indispensable for carbon storage, biodiversity, and local climate regulation. If forest fires were counted as a nation, they would rank as the world’s second-largest carbon emitter. ...
For the first time, large-scale fires simultaneously devastated tropical and boreal forests. Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, and Canada suffered some of their most severe fire seasons in the last 25 years. South America alone accounted for roughly a quarter of global fire-related tree cover loss in 2024. Once hailed as powerful carbon sinks, these regions are now net carbon sources, emitting more greenhouse gases than they can absorb.
Forest fires affect indigenous lands and their ways of life, destroy homes and infrastructure, contaminate water supplies, and inflict significant economic losses to our countries, with US$136 bn lost to global wildfire losses between 2015 and 2024. Even more alarming, wildfire smoke is estimated to cause over 1.5 million premature deaths every year. These cascading impacts reveal that the wildfire crisis is not merely ecological - it is a profound public health and socioeconomic emergency.
Unique biomes such as Bolivia’s Chiquitano dry forest or Brazil’s Cerrado are now losing species that science has not even had the chance to describe. Scientists warn that the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point where its hydrological cycle could collapse, transforming it into a dry savannah-like ecosystem. The climatic repercussions of such a shift are incalculable.
Despite the frequent attribution of fires to climate change, the roots of the crisis are primarily structural and political. In tropical regions, most fires are human-induced, to clear land for agriculture or cattle pastures. The influence of the agribusiness sector on land-use policies in many tropical countries has become a central, yet often unspoken, driver of forest degradation. Until this disproportionate power is curbed and ecological integrity is prioritized over short-term economic gain, fire rates will continue to rise.
This global emergency requires more attention from the CBD. The expanded programme of work on forest biodiversity, the decisions on biodiversity and climate change and the implementation of relevant KMGBF targets should address the economic and political structures perpetuating this destruction, before some of the world’s most important ecosystems, and the stability they provide, are irreversibly lost.
