Protected areas show substantial and increasing risk of wildfire globally

Abstract

Protected area coverage is set to expand in response to climate change and the biodiversity crisis, but we lack assessments of wildfire incidence in protected areas. Here we quantify bigeographical variation in global patterns of burned area in protected areas. During the twenty-first century, wildfires have burned 2 billion hectares of protected areas - an area the size of Russia and India combined - and, while protected areas only cover 19.2% of semi-natural ecosystems, they concentrate 28.5% of the area burned annually. Wildfire in protected areas increased significantly between 2001-2024 (+0.46% yr-1), even after taking into account increases in protected area (+0.27% yr-1), pointing to a disproportional impact of fire on protected areas under increasingly severe fire weather. This pattern showed marked variation across biomes, with the largest disproportionate increases occurring in fire-prone biomes (e.g. Mediterranean and dry tropical forests, tropical grasslands and xeric shrublands). There were important exceptions to this general trend, and protected area fire was lower than expected in biomes where fire activity is naturally limited by moisture (e.g. tropical rainforests or montane grasslands). Wildfires are important for the health of many ecosystems, and such values of burned area will not always mean a negative outcome. Amidst concerted efforts to expand protected area coverage such as the Global Biodiversity Framework, our results highlight the need for new management strategies that address the globally increasing impacts of burned area across protected areas under unabated climate change.