science journalist covering climate, conservation, geology | words in New York Times, National Geographic, others | PhD in very old rocks
Becca Dzombak
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Compared to the 1980s, California condors are thriving, but their numbers are still struggling: Without human-reared additions, their population would be shrinking.
Lead is largely to blame, despite California's ban on lead-based ammo, a new study found.
www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...
Rather than being shocking, though, researchers think the costs and damages from 2025's fire year are emblematic of the world's fire future.
Read the story for more.
Burned area, for example, is going down on average largely because of agricultural expansion in Africa, not because fire is magically disappearing.
And fire intensity and frequency are rising in other places, and more are hitting the urban-wildland interface and urban areas, where many people live.
Checking in on each year's fire activity is important, but the findings need to be built into long-term records that can track how, and why, things are changing over time.
Those boreal forest fires, combined with emissions from 2023 and 2024, emitted more CO2 than all other North American boreal forest fires in the preceding 15 years, the study says.
So it's not just the size of the fire that matters for damage. It's what it burns, too.
And 2025 was a somewhat contradictory year for carbon emissions, too. It saw the third-lowest annual CO2 emissions from fires since 2002.
But Canada had a third consecutive year of extreme burning in its high-latitude forests, which are important carbon stores.
“These fires, which weren’t at all gigantic, remind us that although area burned is the easiest fire-related variable to monitor, it is not necessarily the most important,” said Park Williams, a UCLA climate scientist. “Even small fires can have catastrophic consequences for society.”
The Los Angeles fires burned a small area. But it's densely populated and pricey, so costs — economic and otherwise — quickly spiraled.
Businesses closed. Neighborhoods were destroyed. Health care burdens rose. And hundreds of people died.
Big fires used to be (generally) considered the more damaging ones, and researchers and insurers tended to focus on those, said @pyrogeog.bsky.social. But as more fires tend to hit urban and populated places, like LA, that thinking is changing.
Size isn't everything when it comes to wildfire.
In 2025, the global area burned by wildfires was the second-smallest in modern records. But it was the costliest fire year, mostly due to the Los Angeles fires, a new study says.
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