Is Europe having a bad wildfire year?
This is a re-post from By the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie Over the last week, this chart of wildfire burn in Europe has been doing the rounds on social media and traditional media outlets. Carbon Brief goes through some of this coverage here. The underlying narrative is that Europe is having its lowest wildfire year on record, which is quite at odds with the huge wildfires we see from France and Spain on the news. But this data and the media headlines are not as contradictory as they first appear. The wildfire data we present on Our World in Data comes from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). This uses satellite imagery, which doesn’t distinguish, for example, between forest fires and large-scale burning of agricultural land, grasslands, or savannah. Its aggregate category “Europe” includes Russia. On OWID, we also have predefined regions across our datasets, and Russia falls under “Europe”. Russia, as a country, is split between Europe and Asia. Most of its landmass lies in Asia, but most of its population is on the European side. Since most of our datasets, from poverty and inequality, to health, education, energy consumption and access to resources, are about human activity and...
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