Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Get Ready for More Fires Like the Ones in L.A.

New research shows that climate change is making urban fires more frequent.

Buildings as flame.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

New York City and Los Angeles — America’s two biggest cities — have both burned in the past four months.

Though the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires were far more destructive, turning nearly 40,000 acres of homes, schools, parks, and businesses to ash, the New York fire was in many ways just as startling. A record dry fall in the Northeast led to 600 blazes across the East Coast in October and November, including one in Prospect Park in the heart of Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough. The FDNY later reported that it fought more than 370 brush fires in the five boroughs in 2024 — a rate of more than one a day in a place not traditionally associated with wildfires.

According to new research by Long Shi and his colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, published today in Nature Cities, these kinds of urban fires are becoming increasingly common due to climate change. “The impacts of climate change on vegetation fire have been well explored” by other researchers, Shi told me via email. Until now, however, the impact of anthropogenic warming on urban fires was “still unknown.”

Shi and his colleagues created a global fire incident database covering 2,847 cities across 20 countries. They found that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in air temperature (that’s just shy of 2 degrees Fahrenheit), the frequency of vehicle and outdoor fires increased by about 2.5% and 4.7%, respectively. That means that under a scenario with no new climate mitigation policies, under which greenhouse gas emissions roughly double from current levels by 2100, vehicle fires would increase by 11.6% and outdoor fires by as much as 22.2% by the end of the century.

Fire incidents typically fall into one of four categories: building, vehicle, and outdoor fires, which are usually urban, and vegetation fires, which include forest and grassland fires. Historically, fire research has tended to focus on vegetation fires, but the vast majority of the 50,000 fire-related deaths and 170,000 fire-related injuries sustained each year around the world are in urban fires. Part of that is because urban fires are much more difficult to study. “Some fire ignitions, such as inside buildings, cannot be directly detected by satellites,” Shi and his colleagues write in their report. There was also no preexisting global fire incident databases for Shi’s team to rely on, so they spent years just assembling the fire incident data before they could begin their analysis.

The final 2,847 cities considered for the report account for 20.6% of the global population — “the most comprehensive and biggest city-based fire incident database so far,” Shi said. The researchers then looked at the changes in the frequency of urban fire incidents between 2011 and 2020, focusing on building, vehicle, and outdoor fires, including garbage and landfill fires.

Perhaps surprisingly, Shi’s team found that building fires could decrease by 4.6% under a high greenhouse gas emission scenario. Their research showed that building fire frequency drops when the outdoor air temperature is “comfortable,” from 20 to 26 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit to about 79 degrees Fahrenheit). “This may be because people tend to stay indoors during uncomfortable weather, elevating the likelihood of accessing fire sources or devices that provide ignition sources for fires, such as fireplace heating and electrical cooling appliances,” the authors wrote. (Canada, Estonia, and Finland showed an opposite trend, which the authors hypothesized was because “people in northern countries spend more time outside in winter as they enjoy winter sports” — or just because of the relatively short period of available fire data.)

The increase in vehicle fires is a more interesting case, as the authors note. “Although we cannot separate human factors from vehicle fires, their tendencies differ from those of building fires,” they write, noting that approximately 81% of vehicle fires ensue “without human intervention.” Around two-thirds of those “befall as a result of equipment or heat source failure,” while collisions are responsible for just 5%. The rise reflected in the research may be due to “the increased failure rates of … vehicle components under rising air temperature,” though the authors also note that this finding could change as more people adopt electric vehicles, which catch fire at a lower rate than their gasoline-powered counterparts.

Though Shi is still seeking fire incident data from the countries not included in this study, the research published in Nature could have significant implications for urban planners today, Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who was not involved in the study, told me.

“A lot of our capacity and infrastructure for planning around climate change in the United States really started out focused on sea-level rise and other flood-related risks,” McTarnaghan said. But fires are “a huge piece of that equation, and there’s certainly linkages with climate change that need to be better understood.”

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Electric Vehicles

Tesla Is Now a Culture War Totem (Plus Some AI)

The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.

A Tesla taking an exit.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Tesla

During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.

While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Climate Tech

Climate Tech Is Facing a ‘Moment of Truth’

The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.

Cliimate tech.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.

Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Energy

AM Briefing: Overheard at CERAWeek

On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power

CERAWeek Loves Chris Wright
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Chris Wright says climate change is a ‘side effect of building the modern world’

In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow