War ignited record-breaking wildfires in Ukraine last year, scientists say

By Kate Abnett

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Last year was Ukraine's worst year for wildfires in more than three decades of record-keeping, as shelling along front lines in the war with Russia triggered an unprecedented number of blazes, scientists said.

Forest fires in Ukraine in 2024 burnt more than twice the area destroyed by fire in the entire 27-country European Union in 2024, the EU's Joint Research Centre - its independent science research service - said in a report published this week.

Satellite data showed nearly 9,000 fires torched a total of 965,000 hectares in Ukraine in 2024. Ukraine has around 10 million hectares, or 100,000 sq km (38,610 sq miles), of forest. Around a third of the area burned last year was farmland.

For comparison, the EU member state with the most land burnt last year was Portugal, which lost 147,000 hectares - its worst annual total since 2017.

The JRC said satellite data showed the fires were concentrated in Ukraine's east, in areas apparently in close proximity to front lines of the war.

Ukrainian forests have incurred severe damage as both Russian and Ukrainian armed forces blast thousands of shells at each other every day, shredding the earth.

Maksym Matsala, a forest researcher at Sweden's University of Agricultural Sciences, said the main cause was artillery and falling shells igniting fires.

He said the jump in fires last year was partly because of a large build-up of dead and damaged trees since Russia's invasion in 2022, which had created plentiful fuel for fires during extremely dry weather in 2024.

"If war is continuous, then sooner or later there will be a lot of inaccessible areas and a lot of areas with accumulating dead wood," Matsala told Reuters.

Ukraine's forests are also riddled with land mines and unexploded ordnance that can detonate during fires - making it impossible for firefighters to control the flames.

The EU data only goes back to 2020, but when cross-checked with data from researchers at Ukraine's National University of Life and Environmental Sciences, 2024 was the worst year for forest fires in Ukraine since at least 1990.

Climate change is exacerbating wildfires by increasing the hot and dry conditions that help them spread faster, burn longer and rage more intensely, scientists say. Hotter weather saps moisture from vegetation, turning it into dry fuel.

Ukraine's fires mostly occurred during summer, when this kind of fire-prone weather is more frequent.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett; additional reporting by Max Hunder; editing by Mark Heinrich)