UK Bucks Global Trend With Worst Fire Season on Satellite Record, Report Finds
Quick summary
UK burned area was nearly four times the average in 2025–26, the highest since records began in 2002.
The UK bucked the global trend: worldwide, burned area was 18% below average.
The Dava-Carrbridge fire in the Scottish Highlands burned about 100 km², the UK’s first recorded megafire.
Peat consumed in that fire produced an estimated 85% of its carbon emissions.
More land in Britain burned in 2025 than in any year since satellites began measuring it in 2002. The State of Wildfires 2025–2026 report, published on 11 November in Earth System Science Data, puts UK burned area at 288% above average, close to four times the norm.
The worst of it came in June and July, when the Dava-Carrbridge fire in the Scottish Highlands burned about 100 km² (10,000 hectares). It is the first UK fire to pass the 100 km² mark generally used to define a megafire. In Wales, the Abergwesyn fire burned more than 50 km².
At Dava-Carrbridge, more than 80% of the fire burned at high severity, and peat combustion accounted for an estimated 85% of its carbon emissions. The report draws those figures from a separate study by Schoenecker and colleagues, published this year in Nature Geoscience.
The UK numbers
Worldwide, burned area was 18% below average, making 2025–26 one of the quietest fire years on record. The UK was one of a few countries with a sharp rise.
Fire carbon emissions were 121–169% above average, depending on the dataset, among the largest relative rises worldwide.
Satellites mapped more UK fires than in any previous year, 234% above average.
The largest 5% of UK fires were 146% above average size, the second-highest figure on record.
122 km² of protected land burned. That is 0.21% of the UK’s protected area, but 5.4 times the average and a national record.
One UK forest carbon project lost 51% of its area to fire. Together with a single project in Portugal, it accounted for 92% of all carbon project land burned in Europe.
The UK total is still small compared with southern Europe. Spain burned about 3,600 km², its largest area since 2002, and the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) recorded the continent’s worst season since its figures began in 2006. The report’s own satellite analysis, which counts western Russia as part of Europe, put the continent below average.
How fuel drove the Iberian fires
The report’s case study of north-west Spain and northern Portugal looks at how fuel and weather combined.
A wet spring produced heavy plant growth. A dry summer and repeated heatwaves followed, and by August that growth had dried into continuous fuel. Fourteen fires in the region passed 100 km².
Weather was the main driver. During the peak burning period, from 10 to 19 August, temperature and humidity accounted for more than 70% of the authors’ model predictions. Wind made little difference.
Fuel had what the authors call an “enabling role”. Above-average loads of both living and dead vegetation added to fire activity, so the region went into summer with an unusually large and connected supply of material to burn. Land cover, roads and human presence stayed close to normal.
About 44% of the burned area lay inside Natura 2000 conservation sites, with no evidence that fires there burned any more or less severely than elsewhere.
The report finds that climate change made the August fire weather about three times more likely. The models give a very wide range, from 0.14 to 657 times, so some results show no increase at all.
Why this matters for moorland managers
Two of the report’s findings are relevant to upland management. Across all three case studies, it concludes that the land was primed for extreme fire weeks to months in advance by fuel build-up and drying, and it calls for early-warning systems that track fuel conditions directly.
It also notes, citing Taylor and colleagues (2026), that longer fire seasons can shrink the windows in which burning can be done safely.
In the Moorland Association’s view, the two findings together make the case for planning fuel management well ahead of each fire season. If fuel build-up sets the conditions for the worst fires, and there are fewer safe days to reduce it, cutting and cool, controlled burning need to be scheduled to make full use of the days available.
The Dava-Carrbridge figures show how much carbon is lost when a summer wildfire burns into the peat.
