Brussels, 25 March 2025
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has published a report titled ‘Forest Fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa 2024‘. It offers a broad view of the 2024 wildfire season, which was relatively mild in Europe, Middle East and North Africa, thanks in part to the intermittent rainfall during the summer.
The report nonetheless demonstrates that 2024 was a record-breaking year for forest fires in Ukraine. Satellite imagery shows that nearly one million hectares (965 000 ha) burnt in the country in 2024 – more than twice the area burnt in the entire European Union during the same period.
The spatial distribution of the fires matches the line of the war front between Ukraine and Russia, showing the impact of Russia’s illegal invasion on Ukraine’s forests. The effects of the conflict appear to have been worse in 2024 than in previous fire seasons since the war started.
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Background
This report contains the annual summary of the wildfire season of 2024 on the basis of data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). It is published early in 2025 to provide an advance comprehensive analysis of the wildfire season 2024. The analysis and data in the report complement the near-real time data provided in the web applications of EFFIS during 2024 and precede the complete analysis of the 2024 wildfire season that will be published in collaboration with the EFFIS country network in the last quarter of 2025.
The report includes an analysis of the fire danger situation in 2024 and correlates this with the impact of wildfires, which is represented by the burnt areas mapped in the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). Furthermore, the report provides a time series comparison of the fire danger situation and the impact of wildfires in 2024 in relation to the historical overview of the data series in EFFIS.