Mojataba Sadegh, an associate professor of civil engineering, and Seyd Teymoor Seydi, a research assistant, published “Wildfire disasters are increasingly in the news, yet less land is burning globally – here’s why” with University of California, Merced co-author John Abatzoglou in The Conversation on Aug. 21, 2025.
This article features research the team published in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu6408
An excerpt from the article reads:
“With intense, destructive fires often in the news, it can seem like more land is burning. And in parts of the world, including western North America, it is.
Globally, however, our team of fire researchers also found that the total area burned actually declined by 26% over those two decades.
How is that possible?
We found the driving reasons for those changes in Africa, which has the vast majority of all land burned, but the total burned area there has been falling. Agricultural activities in Africa are increasingly fragmenting wildland areas that are prone to burning. A cultivated farm field and roads can help stop a fire’s spread. But more farms and development in wildland areas also means more people can be exposed to wildfires.”