UK Wildfires in 2025 Have Already Surpassed Annual Record

A helicopter douses a wildfire with water on the Isle of Bute in Colintraive, Scotland on April 10, 2025. Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images

The total area burnt by wildfires in the United Kingdom this year — more than 113 square miles — is higher than any year’s total in over a decade, according to data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS).

Early spring wildfires are common in the UK, and researchers said the prolonged dry weather from March through early April helped create the ideal conditions for widespread fires, reported the BBC.

“We had an exceptionally dry and sunny March,” said Will Lang, head of the Met Office’s risk and resilience services. “This followed quite a wet autumn and winter, which can have the effect of increasing the vegetation that acts as fuel for any fire that does start.”

More than 80 wildfires have been recorded since the beginning of 2025, but recent wetter conditions have mostly stopped the rash of destructive burns.

“The vegetation is coming out of the winter and it has gone dormant, so it’s not growing, and therefore it’s very dry and doesn’t have water,” explained Guillermo Rein, a fire science professor at Imperial College London, as the BBC reported. “Then in the spring, before you start to collect the water into the live tissue, there is a period where it’s very flammable.”

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The total land area consumed by fires this year is already more than the 2019 record of 108 square miles, according to GWIS data collected since 2012, reported the Daily Mail.

Spokesperson for the Met Office Oliver Clayton told MailOnline that there is an increased chance of wildfires in heather heaths and grasslands during dry springs.

“This is often due to the presence of dead undergrowth from the previous year, together with a lack of new plant growth that might otherwise impede the ignition and spread of fires,” Clayton said.

More than 180 square miles were consumed by wildfires from April 2 to 8, the highest weekly total ever recorded, the BBC said.

The early season burns of mostly grass, shrubs and heathlands have complex ecological impacts. Not all wildfires — especially smaller burns of low intensity — are detrimental to long-term landscape health.

Some plants like heather have adapted to fire-prone environments. However, increasingly severe or frequent fires can impede their ability to recover naturally.

“My number one worry is what is going to happen in the summer,” Rein said, when “there are fewer wildfires but they are bigger and they can actually be seriously catastrophic.”

“You can have 100 [small] wildfires across the whole country and all of them can be handled in one day, or you could have one summer wildfire that actually cannot be stopped in a week and actually goes on to burn houses.”

As global heating continues, scientists have warned that the UK will experience an increase in extreme wildfire conditions, though weather conditions vary from year to year.

A Met Office study from last month found that the July 2022 severe wildfires in the UK were a minimum of six times more likely due to human-caused climate change.

“The UK will see more frequent and intense heatwaves like we saw in the summer of 2022, when 40°C temperatures were reached for the first time in the UK,” Stephen Belcher, chief scientist at the Met Office, wrote in the weather and climate service’s official blog. “We need to adapt, and adapt fast, if we are to cope with these new weather extremes, and the impacts of future warming.”

Rory Hadden, a senior lecturer of fire investigation at University of Edinburgh, said land use changes can have a major impact on fire risk.

“One thing that seems to have consensus is that we are likely to see more fires and possibly worse fires with climate change,” Hadden said, as the BBC reported. “We need to be prepared for this to become more common.”

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