SingaporeAfrica’s fire record broke by 23% through April.
World Weather Attribution said 150 million hectares burned globally; Asia’s record also broke, by 40%, as El Niño forms this month.
Imperial College London warned climate change and El Niño combined risk unprecedented weather extremes later this year.
Sources: Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, Hindustan Times, The Straits Times, The Citizen
WHY EL NIÑO BURNS
During El Niño, the Pacific trade winds weaken and warm water pools in the eastern Pacific. This shifts rainfall away from Indonesia, the Amazon, and southern Africa — the world's three great tropical forest basins — turning peat and leaf litter into kindling within months.
THE FIRE TRIANGLE
Fire needs fuel, oxygen, and ignition. Climate sets the fuel state — dry biomass, low humidity, hot winds. Ignition is almost always human: cleared land, escaped agricultural burns, downed power lines. Lightning starts perhaps 10% of wildfires globally; people start the rest.
AFRICA'S FIRE BELT
Most of the world's annual burned area is in African savanna — not forest. The grasslands of Angola, Zambia, DRC, Mozambique, and South Sudan burn every dry season as a normal ecological cycle. What broke the record is intensity and timing, not the existence of fires.
THE CARBON FEEDBACK
Forests and peat store carbon accumulated over centuries. When they burn, that carbon enters the atmosphere within hours. Boreal and tropical peat fires are especially dangerous because the soil itself is fuel — Indonesia's 2015 fires released more CO₂ per day than the entire US economy.
ATTRIBUTION SCIENCE
World Weather Attribution runs the same climate models twice — once with today's CO₂ levels, once with pre-industrial levels — and compares how often a given heatwave or drought occurs in each. The ratio quantifies how much climate change loaded the dice. The method only matured in the 2010s; before it, scientists could only say climate change made extremes 'more likely' in general.
WHAT EL NIÑO DOES TO HARVESTS
Fire is the visible symptom; crop failure is the slower one. El Niño typically cuts rice yields in Southeast Asia, wheat in Australia, and maize in southern Africa, while pushing rainfall onto the Pacific coast of South America. The 12–18 month lag between event and food-price spike is the part markets routinely underprice.