#wildfires

#wildfires

Wildfires are no longer a once-a-year emergency in Canada. In 2025, fires burned more than 8.3 million hectares across multiple provinces (roughly the size of New Brunswick), making it the second-worst wildfire season in the country. Some experts warn this could become the new normal. At The Walrus Talks Wildfires, expert voices from the health, climate, policy, and technology sectors come together to explore the impact of the wildfire crisis.

“fireball burning everything in its path”

Southern California Edison says that with the help of those state laws it expects to pay little or even none of the damage costs of the Eaton fire, which its equipment is suspected of sparking. But in recent filings to state officials, fire victims and consumer advocates say the law has gone too far and made the utilities' unaccountable for their mistakes, leading to even more fires. "What do you think will happen if you constantly protect perpetrators of fires," said Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

Since the 1990s, American homes have been systematically underinsured in the event that they are completely destroyed. Study after study shows that, counter to the public's understanding, many home insurance policies are not required to cover total replacement of homes. The trend, though decades old, has been somewhat hidden. But climate-driven events that cause massive destruction, especially wildfires, are revealing just how pervasive and severe the problem has become.

A year after the January wildfires, most businesses in affected neighborhoods remain shuttered, with those reopened reporting roughly half their previous customer base and revenue. More than 1,800 small businesses across burn zones face an uncertain future, with owners struggling to navigate insurance claims and cleanup costs largely unsupported. Business leaders and major developers are pushing officials to speed up permitting and inspections, saying faster reconstruction is critical for jobs and tax revenue.

My eyes zero in on a red door, its frame one of the few surviving remnants of a home. I pull it closer to me, and in moments I see a fraction of the house as it once was - now I'm in a cozy kitchen with blurred but welcoming pictures in the background and a grandfather celebrating a birthday. A voice-over tells me that it was Alexander, a grandfather, who painted the door red.

"Because I don't know if I've made a financial decision that's gonna ruin us, or are we just going to be optimistic and hope that it will work out?"

There were no stars in the October sky. No moon that 64-year-old Masuma Khan could see from the narrow window of the California City Immigration Processing Center. "No planes," she said, recalling her confinement. Once a prison, the facility in the Mojave Desert, located 67 miles east of Bakersfield, reopened in April to hold people in removal proceedings, including Khan. It was not the kind of place where she imagined ending up - not after living in the country for 28 years, caring for her daughter and surviving one of California's deadliest wildfires, the Eaton fire.

According to Mike Zolnikov, who tends a couple of acres of Pinot Noir and an acre of Chardonnay on a flat, slightly soggy patch of the central Willamette Valley, in Oregon, it had been a once-in-a-decade growing season. "Not too hot, not too wet," he recalled, wistfully. "It would have been a really great year." A few hundred miles south, in California's Napa Valley, the winemaker Ashley Egelhoff, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, was feeling similarly about her Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc.

Ten English fire services tackled a record number of grassland, woodland and crop fires during what was the UK's hottest spring and summer on record, figures show. In total nearly 27,000 wildfires were dealt with by fire services in England during the prolonged dry weather of 2025, according to analysis by PA Media. One fire chief said the summer was one of the most challenging that crews had ever faced and the frequency and intensity of the wildfires was putting a strain on resources.

PG&E, the utility company that last week reintroduced one third of San Franciscans to the Dickensian joys of wearing coats indoors and tabulating the losses of spoiled food by candlelight, is not popular. Last night, in a move that would be on the nose if you could locate your face in the dark, a planned power outage was rudely preceded by an unplanned power outage.

Described as the "western hemisphere's most sophisticated weather-observing and environmental-monitoring system," the GOES-R satellite series is capable of providing data from diverse weather phenomena. This year, it captured several images of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano, which erupted from December 2024 to February 2025. In March, the lava fountain reached heights of over 1,000 feet, the highest it's been in about 50 years.

2025 was another historic year-making headlines for disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, catastrophic floods in Texas, and deadly heatwaves in Europe and Asia. But it was also a year of collaboration-with researchers, scientists, policymakers, students and others coming together to share ideas and plans to address the effects of climate change, during Climate Week NYC and COP30, among other initiatives.

Over the course of 2025, millions of images have been filed through our picture system from agencies who cover news all over the world. The images taken by their teams of photojournalists, filed through local editors and international desk editors, are a mainstay of our coverage of international news, and enable the production of reactive news stories as well as features and visual essays.

Southern California Edison did not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance of its aging transmission lines that it told regulators was necessary and began billing to customers in the four years before the Jan. 7 wildfires, according to a Times review of regulatory filings. Edison told state regulators in its 2023 wildfire prevention plan that it believed its giant, high-voltage transmission lines, which carry bulk power across its territory, "generally have a lower risk of ignition" than its smaller distribution wires, which deliver power to neighborhoods.

The 33 percent drop was recorded despite the wildfires that ravaged wealthy neighbourhoods in Los Angeles in January, burning more than 9,308 hectares (23,000 acres), destroying homes and businesses and forcing thousands to flee. Swiss Re put the insured losses from the inferno at $40bn, labelling it the globe's costliest wildfire to date. That single event was a major contributor to the $107bn in insured losses from natural catastrophes in 2025.

As California again delays controversial rules requiring homeowners in fire-prone areas to maintain a 5-foot ember-resistant zone around their houses, a new report finds that properties that were already close to that standard were much less likely to be destroyed in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January. With ashes still smoldering, researchers with the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, an industry-backed group, surveyed 252 homes that had been in the path of the blazes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.

After 24 days of burning, his entire life looked different. Between tours, the famed DJ and dance music producer, born Ryan Raddon, spent the majority of his time at Palisades hot spots like the Village. Now he frequents Santa Monica and Brentwood by force. Of the 30 families in his church, only four of their houses remain standing, including his. Unfortunately, his brother's house was lost to the fires.

The year began with the art world-like much of the rest of the world-holding its breath, waiting to see what America's newly re-elected president, Donald J. Trump, had on his Washington to-do list. Meanwhile, on America's other coast, a series of wildfires in and around Los Angeles burned up around 60,000 acres, killing hundreds of people, displacing thousands more, and consuming architectural landmarks as well as untold works of art.

J ulian Canadien, a Dene man from Kakisa, Northwest Territories, is swarmed by black flies while he pulls weeds from the soil beneath his feet. The bugs don't bother him much. He's the only paid employee at the community garden, where his job is to prune and clear the rows of vegetables, water the produce, and churn the compost. And he likes his job.

Breathless as if the smoke still lingered, on a recent morning she bundled her effervescent 3-year-old daughter, Luna, into her car seat for the two-hour trek from her aunt's house in Riverside, where they have lived for much of the past year, back to their family's 1909 Craftsman home. It stands steps from the Eaton fire burn scar - untouched, but uninhabitable.

The remaining carbon budget available to humans is running out, according to new research. The 1.5C global warming limit which is the top amount of emissions that can be put into the atmosphere above pre-industrial levels is nearly exhausted according to the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute study. And this year, fossil fuel carbon emissions are expected to hit record highs, increasing by 1.1 per cent globally. At the current rate, humans will have used up the 1.5C limit within four years spelling danger for future generations dealing with the repercussions of climate change.

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.

In the case of the Eaton fire, my Times colleagues Grace Toohey and Terry Castleman reported Saturday that as the blaze spread on the evening of Jan. 7, firefighters in the field urged a broader evacuation. But the orders were delayed by three hours in West Altadena, where 18 people died and numerous residents raced for their lives as thousands of homes were incinerated.

What's the weather like over there? asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains, in his distinctive, mellifluous voice perhaps a little hoarser than it once was and his preoccupation with the climate. It's a dark evening in London but a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt.

A popular ski resort town in Colorado is adopting a new AI Smart City Solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it better detect wildfires, as well as update a range of other city services. Vail is expanding its firefighting toolbox as hotter, more arid weather with climate change raises wildfire risk in the western US. Colorado has suffered 11 of the 20 largest fires in state history just within the last five years.

"The impacts of climate change are proven and undeniable,"

Most garden tasks are just about making the place look aesthetically pleasing - but there's one that is a legal obligation and could even be a matter of life or death. This is débroussaillement (pronounced day-broo-say-eh-mon) - the French term for clearing away brush, vegetation and dead leaves. The reason that this is important is related to wildfires - and in fact, homeowners in some parts of France, where wildfires are common, have a legal obligation to do this every year.