Wildfire burn area by country, 2002-2021

Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa experienced some of the highest totals of land burned by wildfires from 2002 to 2021, an analysis of satellite data shows.

A map shows highest burn totals over two decades in central Africa, Australia and Brazil.

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Satellite data can underestimate totals when considering small fires or multiple fires in the same location.

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-NDSource: Seyd Teymoor Seydi, et al., 2025Get the dataEmbed Download imageCreated with Datawrapper