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Can Forests Withstand and Recover from Wildfires?
While many forests have evolved to adapt to wildfires, more frequent and intense fires, plus increased pressures from climate change, are making even resilient forests more vulnerable.
A forest's ability to recover from wildfires is dependent on interconnected elements. Image by
chameleonseye/iStock
Wildfires haven’t always been bad news for forests. Some forests have evolved to cope with these brutal events. Traits like thicker tree bark or heat-resistant seed pods ensure trees can survive and even thrive after fires — some forests even depend on them.
But over the last several decades, more frequent, larger and intense forest fires are burning forests that have historically not experienced nor adapted to fires. In 2024, unprecedented fires burned 13 million hectares of natural forests and planted trees, an area roughly the size of Greece, and emitted 4.1 billion tons of greenhouse gases — more than four times the emissions from air travel in 2023.
When fires become more frequent and intense, even resilient forests are vulnerable to severe damage. Added pressures such as climate change, forest fragmentation, and the spread of tree pests and diseases, can also make forests more prone to fires and less likely to recover, reducing their capacity to store carbon and support wildlife.
While recovery can occur naturally, it may take decades or even centuries. Tree planting and other interventions can accelerate forest growth after fires, especially where forests have been severely damaged or natural regeneration is not possible. But ultimately, burned areas must be left to regrow rather than be cleared for agriculture or other uses.
Here, we explore whether forests can withstand and recover from fires and how forest resilience can be strengthened through protection, restoration and management strategies.
How Do We Measure Burned Forests?
We measure the area of forests burned by fires by looking at data that shows where fires have killed trees or severely damaged the forest canopy, known as stand-replacing fires. While these fires do not always cause permanent forest loss, they can cause long-term changes to forest structure and soil chemistry. This is different than lower-intensity understory fires, which largely burn the vegetation that grows underneath trees on the forest floor, allowing trees in fire-adapted ecosystems to successfully recover. However, in normally wet forests that are not adapted to fire such as the Amazon, even these lower-intensity fires can cause severe damage and tree mortality.
We use data on tree cover loss due to fire produced by the University of Maryland, which captures both natural and human-ignited fires that directly cause tree cover loss, including fires that escape from already cleared agricultural land and then spread into forests. It excludes burning within recently cleared areas (e.g., slash-and-burn agriculture) because the loss was not directly caused by fire.
We then use satellite images to look at 30 x 30-meter satellite pixels of forest after a fire. For each pixel, it is considered tree cover loss if more than 50% of the canopy cover is gone, or if less than 10% of the canopy cover is left. Only the first stand-replacing disturbance in a pixel is recorded, so repeating fires in the same area are not captured. Read more here about how we define tree cover and how tree cover loss differs from deforestation.
Are Wildfires Getting Bigger and More Frequent?
In 2023 and 2024, fire-driven tree cover loss was roughly twice the global annual average of the last two decades, and three times higher in the tropics, as record-breaking fires raged across Canada and South America. These two years were notably the warmest on record.
For some forests, fires are essential. Boreal forests, which are mostly made up of evergreen trees in northern regions like Canada and Russia, accounted for about 60% of tree cover loss due to fire between 2001 and 2024. Having evolved alongside fire for thousands of years, the trees in these forests have developed thick bark and heat-resistant seed pods that open after burning, allowing them to withstand and recover from fires. But these adaptations can fail when fires become too intense or frequent, sometimes leading to permanent forest loss when forests transition to grasslands.
Such adaptations are absent in tropical rainforests like the Amazon, which until recently experienced very little fire. In these ecosystems, fires can be catastrophic, killing trees, harming Indigenous communities, releasing vast amounts of stored carbon and damaging wildlife habitats.
The consequences of larger and more frequent fires are already severe. Global carbon emissions from forest fires increased 60% between 2001 and 2023. Fires in Canada alone released about 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, roughly equivalent to India’s total fossil fuel emissions that year. Air pollution caused by wildfire smoke has been linked to more than 1.5 million deaths each year. In addition to the impact of fire on community health and livelihoods, forest fires have destroyed an estimated $45 billion to $77 billion worth of mostly commercial timber since 2001.
Wildlife has also suffered devastating losses with billions of animals— including many threatened and endangered species — killed or displaced.
What Makes Forests More Vulnerable to Fire?
A forest’s resilience to fire includes its ability to withstand or resist fire, as well as its ability to recover from it. Several interconnected elements influence this:
Forest type. Many forests, such as in the western U.S., Mediterranean Basin and Brazilian Cerrado, have adapted to fires, developing traits like thick bark that allow them to withstand and even benefit from periodic fires. In contrast, wet tropical forests like the Amazon and Congo Basin, as well as peatland forests, have historically experienced little fire, lack fire-resistant traits, and can suffer high tree mortality even from brief fires, hindering recovery.
Forest connectivity, structure and composition. While connected forest landscapes can allow fire to spread more easily, connectivity also preserves cooler, moister microclimates that reduce fire risk and provide refuges that serve as seed sources for recovery. Furthermore, commercial plantations, with their high density of young trees, thin bark and low crowns, are generally more vulnerable to fire than older primary forests.
Fire frequency. The frequency of fires occurring in forests varies greatly based on climate and vegetation. Some boreal forests may burn as little as once a century, while dry tropical forests like the Brazilian Cerrado experience fires every few years and have evolved to survive this frequency. Yet even well-adapted species can suffer damage when fires occur too frequently. Black spruce, a dominant boreal species, produces seeds only every 30 to 40 years. This is sufficient when fires occur once per century, but repeated burns within a few decades can eliminate seedlings before they mature, leading to long-term species loss.
Fire intensity and severity. Low temperature fires and fires that stay low to the ground often spare trees from lasting damage, allowing forests to recover more quickly. In contrast, more severe fires tend to burn hotter and can hinder forest regeneration by moving through tree canopies, killing trees, and damaging roots and soil structures.
Deforestation and fragmentation. Agricultural expansion is one of the leading drivers of deforestation, leaving behind large amounts of debris that can fuel more intense fires. Between 2000 and 2020, more than half of the world’s forests became more fragmented, creating gaps in the canopy that dry out the forest floor and allow flammable grasses to invade. Fragmentation also leaves fewer refuges that serve as seed sources for recovery after fire damage. The impact is especially severe in tropical rainforests like the Amazon where fires are not a natural part of the ecosystem.
Climate change. Nearly half of all forests globally are now more vulnerable to drought than they were before the turn of the century, and the majority are twice as likely to experience extreme fire weather. Rising temperatures are making many regions hotter and drier, lengthening fire seasons and increasing fire intensity — particularly in boreal regions like Canada and Russia. Climate models project that fire-prone conditions could rise 111% by the end of this century in those regions. When fires burn larger areas, they release massive amounts of carbon, creating a feedback loop in which climate change drives more fires that, in turn, release more carbon. In the short term, some fire-adapted ecosystems may remain resilient, but longer-term shifts in forest structure, age and species composition are already underway. If current trends continue, forests risk shifting from a carbon sink to a carbon source.
What Can We Do to Support Forest Resilience and Prevent Wildfires?
In the face of this uncertain future, targeted action is needed to help forests recover and thrive.
Strengthening forest resilience means not only restoring what’s been lost but also protecting existing forests and supporting the people that keep forests healthy.
These strategies can help forests recover and remain resilient in a warming world:
- Restore burned forests to strengthen resilience. Preventing forests from becoming agricultural land after a fire allows forests the chance to regenerate, recover carbon and restore ecological functions. This creates cooler, moister microclimates that lower fire risk and help reverse some of the damage from deforestation and degradation. In the case of highly-damaged landscapes, active tree planting may be necessary to speed up recovery. Protecting forests that naturally store more carbon also helps slow climate change, which is fueling more intense fires.
- Protect forests from fires and climate-proof them to reduce future fires. Forests, particularly those not adapted to fire, can be protected from fires by fire breaks, zero-burn land-clearing practices and fire bans. In managed forests, drought resilient species can be introduced, pests and diseases can be controlled, and maintaining a diversity of species and ages can reduce mortality and susceptibility to more burning.
- Support Indigenous and community leadership through secure land rights. Indigenous peoples and local communities are among the most effective forest stewards. Strengthening land rights and community-led restoration improves forest health and livelihoods while reducing deforestation. Where land rights are secure, forests managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities tend to regrow faster and store more carbon. In addition, traditional fire management such as controlled burns can reduce long-term fire damage in fire-adapted forests.
- Expand financing for recovery and prevention. Financial mechanisms like the Tropical Forest Forever Facility support forest protection, and WRI’s Forest Resilience Bond provides direct investment toward restoration, fire prevention and post-fire recovery. Partnerships with organizations such as the Lomakatsi Restoration Project in the U.S. show how local capacity building can support both ecological recovery and community wellbeing through workforce development. In the tropics, more than 200 projects have collectively planted more than 30 million trees and created tens of thousands of jobs.
Ultimately, recovery of forests after wildfires is a complex process and depends on a forest type’s ability to withstand and recover from fires, as well as its fire pattern and other factors such as droughts. To keep forests from losing their assets and turning into liabilities, it’s imperative to take action to protect and improve their resilience to fires.
Masha van der Sande is an assistant professor at the Forest Ecology and Forest Management group in Wageningen University in The Netherlands.