Rich US Neighborhoods Are More Likely to Burn in Wildfires, Study Reveals
“…”These urban fires consistently occur in suburban, high-income, owner-occupied development,” says co-author Dion Kucera, an urban ecologist at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).
“That hasn’t changed in more than 40 years.”
Kucera and UCR landscape ecologist Darrel Jenerette analyzed 141 fires that intersected urban areas across the US between 1984 and 2025.
The number of fires each year did not increase significantly.
But the larger fires have been getting larger, with fires burning at least 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles) showing an upward trend in total area burned – though that trend is driven largely by a handful of extreme fire years, and isn’t statistically robust under every test.
Meanwhile, more people are living in the path of these fires.
The proportion of the US population living in fire-exposed census tracts has remained remarkably stable, at around 0.9 percent, but the absolute number of people in those areas rose from about 2.1 million in 1990 to 2.8 million in 2023.
The researchers say population growth in general, rather than a major shift of people into increasingly fire-prone areas, appears to explain much of that increase.
Locations of and temporal trends for all assessed urban-intersecting fires between 1984-2025. (Kucera & Jenerette, npj Urban Sustainability, 2026)
The fires also weren’t necessarily preceded by the kind of prolonged drought that might seem like an obvious warning sign. Instead, they tended to occur after relatively short-term drying – a recent drop in moisture that can arrive after a wetter period.
“That suggests three- to six-month moisture measures may be more important for city managers trying to identify periods of heightened risk, rather than longer-term drought assessments,” Kucera says…”
Original:
Increasing burned area and unequal ecological recovery in U.S. urban-intersecting fires
