The world is staring down what scientists are calling a potentially catastrophic 2026 wildfire season, and the numbers already on the board are nothing short of alarming. Researchers have issued a stark warning that this year could go down as one of the most destructive on record for wildfires globally — driven by the compounding forces of climate change and what may turn out to be a powerful El Niño event.
According to Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London and member of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network, the 2026 global fire season has come out of the gates at a pace nobody was fully prepared for. “This year, the global fire season has started very fast,” Keeping told reporters this week. The statistics backing that statement up are hard to ignore.
Wildfires have already scorched 50% more land than the average for this time of year, and the total area burned globally is now more than 20% above the previous record — a record that only dates back to 2012 when modern tracking began. In Africa alone, 85 million hectares have burned so far in 2026, compared to the previous record of 69 million hectares. That’s not a marginal uptick — that’s a seismic shift.
The destruction hasn’t been confined to one region. Unprecedented fires have ripped through West Africa and the Sahel, southern Chile, Argentine Patagonia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. In Europe, Spain and Portugal have taken some of the worst hits. Meanwhile, Asia has also been hammered, with massive fire outbreaks recorded across India, Southeast Asia, and northeastern China — burning nearly 40% more than in 2025, which was itself a record year.
One of the more counterintuitive drivers behind all of this is heavy rainfall. It sounds backwards, but unusually high precipitation in affected regions during the previous season triggered a surge in grass growth. When those areas then dried out under drought and heatwave conditions, all that vegetation became the perfect kindling. Keeping describes this rapid swing between wet and dry extremes as “hydroclimatic whiplash” — and it’s becoming increasingly common across West Africa.
The threat of a 2026 Super El Niño could make the global wildfire crisis far worse
Scientists are now tracking a 61% probability that an El Niño event will develop between May and July 2026 and persist through the end of the year, if not longer. Some researchers are already using the phrase “Super Niño” to describe what could be coming. El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific Ocean climate cycle that has far-reaching effects on global weather patterns — but the critical context here is that it’s arriving on top of decades of accumulated human-caused warming.
“The likelihood of extreme and devastating fires could be the highest we’ve seen in recent history if a strong El Niño develops,” Keeping warned. Friederike Otto, co-founder of WWA and a climate science lecturer also based at Imperial College London, was measured in her response, noting there’s no need for panic — but she did acknowledge that El Niño is now playing out against a dramatically warmer baseline than it ever has before.
Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University in Malaysia, zeroed in on the public health dimension, which often gets lost in the focus on land destruction. She pointed out that wildfire smoke is not ordinary air pollution — fine particles from wildfire smoke can be up to 10 times more harmful to human health than those from traffic emissions.
A 2024 study published in The Lancet found that 1.5 million deaths annually are already linked to air pollution, with that figure projected to rise as climate change drives more frequent and intense fire events. The World Meteorological Organisation also flagged in March that global greenhouse gas concentrations — released primarily through the burning of oil, coal, and gas — are pushing the atmosphere and oceans to warming levels unprecedented in the recorded history of our planet.
The 2023–2024 El Niño ranked among the five most intense ever recorded, acting as an accelerant on top of existing climate change and helping make 2024 the hottest year in history. If the 2026 version shapes up to be stronger, the world — and South Africa, which sits firmly within the Southern Hemisphere weather systems influenced by El Niño — needs to be paying very close attention to what’s already unfolding in the sky.