Wildfires raging this week in southern Georgia and northern Florida were fueled by a combination of hot and windy conditions, severe drought and dried-out vegetation from past hurricanes all feeding the blazes.
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It’s a combination climate scientists have been warning about for decades as the planet gets hotter.
“This is not normal at all, but it is consistent with what we’ve been worried about with climate change,” said Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science research group Climate Central. “It all speaks to how dramatically we really are changing our climate.”
Thousands of acres are on fire across the two states, with one blaze in Atkinson, Georgia, already destroying around 90 homes since it broke out Monday.
Multiple counties in both states have enacted burn bans — including the first burn bans in Georgia — and Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency Wednesday for 91 counties.
Widespread drought in the Southeast is largely to blame for the fires, but their spread has also been fueled by leftover debris from past hurricanes that swept across the region — an issue that also has connections to climate change.
In particular, Hurricane Helene in 2024, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida’s Big Bend region, left behind downed trees, branches and other vegetation ripe to burn.
“The hurricane basically ripped up a bunch of trees and kind of just dropped them all in the area,” Trudeau said. “They sat out in the sun drying out, and the more oily trees can be super flammable when they dry out.”
She added that this kind of dried-out vegetation exacerbates the risk of wildfires, helping them grow and become more destructive when they do break out.
Scientists have said that devastating wildfires will become more common in a warming world, and studies have shown that blazes will not only be more frequent, but also more destructive, as a result of climate change. The findings have enormous environmental, financial and health consequences for communities across the country and the world.
Even in humid places like the Southeast, which is not thought to be as prone to wildfires as the western United States, regional risks are changing in a warming world, according to Trudeau.
“This is what we’ve been expecting with climate change,” she said. “Parts of the Southeast have been super, super dry. And we’ve seen in these places, even though it’s more humid, climate change is making the atmosphere thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils, also increases.”
Wildfires need two main ingredients to burn: conducive fire weather — dry conditions together with lightning and wind, for instance — and “fuel,” which consists of dead trees, dried-out leaves and any other flammable vegetation.
As temperatures rise due to climate change, the atmosphere can more efficiently pull moisture out of trees and soil. When a region is out under persistent drought at the same time, there is not enough precipitation to compensate, setting the stage for destructive wildfires.
The entire state of Florida is currently under some form of drought conditions, with most of the Panhandle area in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Seventy-one percent of Georgia is similarly in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, including huge swaths in the southern portion of the state.
For Trudeau, this week’s wildfires are yet another sign that climate change is wreaking havoc on natural ecosystems and increasing fire activity across the country, including in historically humid landscapes.
“That’s why we’re seeing such crazy conditions right now,” Trudeau said. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm-type of situation.”
