Burning questions: a more fire-prone world

Summary

Economist Podcasts – "Burning Questions: A More Fire-Prone World"

Date: July 28, 2026
Host: Jason Palmer
Featured Expert: Oliver Morton (Planetary Affairs Editor)

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the escalating global crisis of wildfires—why they are growing more frequent and severe, the broader implications beyond immediate damage, and what can be done both to prevent and better manage them. Planetary affairs editor Oliver Morton joins Jason Palmer to analyze recent unprecedented wildfires (especially in Europe), the compounding drivers of fire risk, and the possibilities for coordinated global response.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. New Levels of Wildfire Threat

• Unprecedented Wildfires in Europe

  • Unusually destructive wildfires are currently threatening areas around Madrid, Spain and parts of France, prompting leaders to describe the situation as the worst since WWII ([01:06]-[02:37]).
  • This signals a troubling global trend: fire seasons are not only longer, but fires themselves are becoming more intense and harder to control.

  “Each use of the word unprecedented in each new country in each passing year makes the direction of travel worryingly clearer. More fires, worse fires, more fire related deaths.” — Jason Palmer ([01:37])

• Global Scale and Variety

  • Fires that may seem “normal” in Australia or Canada are now hitting countries unused to such disasters.
  • There is a worldwide increase in both the number of fire-prone days and the severity of events, including extraordinary “outlier” fires with record intensity, speed, or damage ([03:19]).

  “Fire seasons are getting longer, the number of days of intense fire proneness… are also going up. And that means you’re going to be seeing more fires and bigger fire seasons.” — Oliver Morton ([03:25])

2. The Expanding Human and Environmental Toll

• Beyond Physical Damage:

  • While property loss is immense, the principal killer is often smoke inhalation, with global air quality events affecting up to a billion people per year ([04:46]).
  • It’s estimated that a quarter-million people die each year from the smoke effects of wildfires ([05:00]).

  “The way in which fires kill most people is through the smoke.” — Oliver Morton ([04:46])
  "Some estimates suggest that a quarter of a million people every year die of the smoke effects of fires." ([05:03])

• Increasing Vulnerability:

  • Risk is rising fastest among older populations, partly due to an aging global demographic ([05:20]).

3. Fire, Feedback Loops, and Climate

• Positive and Negative Effects:

  • Fires release CO₂, fueling long-term planetary warming ([05:53]).
  • Some smoke can have short-term cooling effects, especially in the Arctic—this is an area of active research ([05:59]).
  • Wildfires have unexpected biological consequences, such as fertilizing oceans and triggering plankton blooms ([06:38]).

  “Fires release CO₂ and that heats the atmosphere further. And that’s an effect that lasts for centuries unless someone develops a way to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere.” — Oliver Morton ([05:54])

• Complexity of Global Fire Patterns:

  • The impact of major fires (e.g., Australia’s Black Summer, Canadian and Californian megafires) extends well beyond localities, affecting global atmospheric and ecological systems ([06:40]).

4. Geographic Expansion of Fire Risk

• Emerging Danger Zones:
  • Indonesia is highlighted as a looming hotspot due to drier El Niño conditions and increased slash-and-burn agriculture driven by biofuel demand ([07:18]).
  • Australia and atypical fire regions now face more frequent, extreme events.
  • As plants grow faster with increased CO₂ and temperatures, fire-prone landscapes become even more combustible ([08:25]).

5. Prevention and Preparedness

• The Hard Work of Prevention:

  • Effective prevention requires sustained effort in landscape management, fire breaks, and behavioral regulation ([08:52]).
  • Commitment is crucial, but growing fire intensity makes persistent efforts more challenging.

  “There are lots of things that people know how to do… They take time and they take real effort. And the problem is that if the fires are getting worse and worse, that effort is harder to find.” — Oliver Morton ([08:57])

• Technological and Strategic Advances in Firefighting:

  • Rapid detection via satellites is a major recent development—early intervention is key ([09:29]).
  • Advances in fire modeling, drone use, and potentially electrically-powered aircraft could improve firefighting, especially in wealthier nations ([09:45]).
  • Global Knowledge Sharing Is Lacking:
    • Currently, best practices and lessons learned are poorly shared internationally, hampering progress ([10:33]).

  “There aren’t very good mechanisms for places in the world learning from each other… Taking best practices from different places could give firefighters a real edge.” — Oliver Morton ([10:35])

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the Broader Meaning of ‘Unprecedented’

  “Each use of the word unprecedented in each new country in each passing year makes the direction of travel worryingly clearer.” — Jason Palmer ([01:37])

• On the Main Killers in Wildfires:

  “The way in which fires kill most people is through the smoke.” — Oliver Morton ([04:46])

• On Feedback Loops:

  “Fires release CO₂ and that heats the atmosphere further. And that’s an effect that lasts for centuries…” — Oliver Morton ([05:54])

• On the Challenge of Prevention:

  “You have to really care about preventing them… They take real effort. And the problem is that if the fires are getting worse and worse, that effort is harder to find.” — Oliver Morton ([08:53])

• On the Importance of Early Action:

  “After the fire that you stop from getting started at all, the fire that you stopped when it was still very small is the best kind of fire.” — Oliver Morton ([09:36])

• Sign-off (tinged with realism):

  “Well, I’d say it was a pleasure to be here, Jason, but the circumstances slightly forbid it. Still always good to talk to you.” — Oliver Morton ([11:09])

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Important Timestamps

• [01:06] — Episode opens, context of ‘unprecedented’ wildfires
• [03:19] — Oliver Morton contextualizes why these fires matter globally
• [04:46] — Discussion of non-direct causes of harm (smoke effects)
• [05:53] — Wildfire contributions to climate feedback loops
• [07:18] — Regions likely to face worsening fire seasons next
• [08:41] — Prevention of wildfires and the difficulty of maintaining efforts
• [09:29] — Modern firefighting advances and limitations
• [10:33] — Gaps in global coordination and knowledge-sharing

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Tone and Language

• Concise, data-driven, and global in perspective.
• Oliver Morton’s language balances technical depth with clear analogies.
• The tone is urgent yet analytical, highlighting the scale and complexity of the crisis while candidly acknowledging the gaps and challenges in response.

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Summary for New Listeners

If you haven’t listened to this episode, it provides an incisive primer on how and why wildfires are worsening globally—not just in magnitude, but in consequences for public health and climate. The conversation with Oliver Morton explores the hard truths of prevention and firefighting, the intricacies of climate-fire feedback, and why global cooperation is more needed than ever. This episode will expand your understanding well beyond the usual headlines of burning forests, revealing the interconnected threats and the preventative actions still within reach—if the world can muster the will.

Transcript

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[Jason Palmer]

The economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. Today on the show, the lean in generation appears to be leaning out and the American cities rethinking what happens after dark. First up, though, Unprecedented. It's a word that people including France's President Emmanuel Macron keep using to describe rampant wildfires. Yesterday, Mr. Macron said the situation France is dealing with is the toughest since the Second World War. In Spain, near Madrid, the situation is just as tough. Each use of the word unprecedented in each new country in each passing year makes the direction of travel worryingly clearer. More fires, worse fires, more fire related deaths.

[Oliver Morton]

As of this morning, 28th July, the situation seems extremely finely balanced.

[Jason Palmer]

Oliver Morton is our planetary affairs editor.

[Oliver Morton]

The Spanish authorities have talked about the next few hours being absolutely crucial because in the coming days we're expecting to see an increase in temperatures as things get back into true heat wave territory. And that could be very bad for the Faznia, Bordeaux and those west and northwest of Madrid and Spain.

[Jason Palmer]

So put this in context for me because we have spoken about wildfires on the show lots of times before, but this does seem to be at a different scale. Can you put some bounds on this for us?

[Oliver Morton]

Well, it's at a different scale for the places where it's happening. These aren't wildfires that would necessarily get noticed all that much in, say, Australia or Canada, but it's illustrating a point that is actually applicable more or less all around the world, which is that fire seasons are getting longer, the number of days of intense fire proneness A very high fire weather index are also going up. And that means that you're going to be seeing more fires and bigger fire seasons. But you're also seeing an increase in what some people sometimes call extraordinary fires. Fires that leap out along one dimension or another of their sheer intensity or their size, or the speed at which they spread, or the amount of damage that they do. So in 2019, 20, we saw these extraordinary fires in Southeast Australia mainly, but also across a lot the rest of Australia, which were called the Black Summer fires. There were the extraordinary fires of 2023 in Canada, where the burning forest gave out four times as much CO as Canada produces by burning fossil fuels in a year. And then last year, the fires in Los Angeles did more damage, as recorded by insurance companies, than any other fires that I think the world has ever seen.

[Jason Palmer]

But the actual physical damage, property damage, is really only one dimension of it.

[Oliver Morton]

Absolutely. The way in which fires kill most people is through the smoke. And this is something that I think people are only really beginning to catch onto now, partly because the world was watching the Eastern seaboard of the United States when the World cup was on. And so when the world's looking at you and you're covered in smoke, that's a way of thinking that the smoke effects really are quite large. And some estimates suggest that quarter of a million people every year die of the smoke effects of fires. Something like a billion people a year have an air quality event due to wildfire smoke within their houses for at least one day. And this really does rack up the casualties. And it's something where we're facing a double acceleration because the people most at risk of this are older people and the world's population is aging. And also the amount of the world that's burning seems to be going up.

[Jason Palmer]

But in terms of additive effects, you mentioned also about the carbon dioxide released in Canada, for example, doesn't that create a feedback loop that basically the causes of the fires are released by more fires and so on?

[Oliver Morton]

Yeah, as you say, fires release CO2 and that heats the atmosphere further. And that's an effect that lasts for centuries unless someone develops a way to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere. They also, of course, produce smoke, and that can often have a cooling effect. And the degree to which wildfires in the boreal forests of Canada and Russia may be slowing the warming of the Arctic, or even slightly cooling the Arctic is an area of active research. It's possible that the extraordinary Black Summer fires in Australia may have contributed to the conditions that kept the Pacific in its La Nina state for three years on the trot straight afterwards. These are extraordinarily large things at the top end of the fire range, and they can have effects that verge on the global. They also have biological effects. After the black summer fires, there was a huge bloom of phytoplankton in the Pacific downwind of them, where the smoke was fertilizing the seas, and the seas were coming alive in response. And that might slightly reduce the carbon dioxide buildup. And the Earth is, as I believe we discussed, Jason, a pretty complicated system,

[Jason Palmer]

which makes a discussion of where we should expect worse effects even more complicated. I suppose you mentioned not just that places that get fires are getting worse fires, but places that don't normally get fires will start to get them. Is there something of a map in your mind as to where to watch for as this gets worse?

[Oliver Morton]

The next thing to worry about, I think, is probably Indonesia, because there the fires are not necessarily of the same sort. They're often deliberately said because of slash and burn agriculture. And we have two seemingly unrelated things happening. One is that the misbegotten war in the Gulf means that demand for biofuels, which drives some of the slash and burn, is going up. And at the same time, we have an El Nino effect, the opposite of La Nina, which is drying out that part of Southeast Asia. And so people worried about Indonesian wildfires are looking at a very bad second half of this year. There's also the risk, as there always is, that there'll be something quite dramatic in Australia. The situation isn't quite like the one that brought about the 2019 wildfires. And fire seasons can be very sensitive to the initial conditions. But you'd look at the objective facts of there being an El Nino going on and what appears to be a positive direction for one of the other big climate markers called the Indian Ocean dipole. And you worry about the coming fire season in Australia, but as you say, you shouldn't be worrying just about the places where you're used to this. And when you up the amount of fuel by putting in carbon dioxide, which makes plants grow faster, and you also increase temperatures, then bits of the world that like to burn like to burn even more.

[Jason Palmer]

Okay, so let's try to simplify then, what could be done under these seemingly worsening conditions to prevent fires, not fight them, but just prevent them.

[Oliver Morton]

Well, the first answer is you have to really care about preventing them. There are lots of things that people know how to do in terms of both landscape management and in terms of trying to control people's behaviors within those landscapes and trying to alter those landscapes with fire breaks and things like that. All these things are not unknown, but how to do them best is not necessarily clear. And they take time and they take real effort. And the problem is that if the fire fires are getting worse and worse, that effort is harder to find.

[Jason Palmer]

What about, then, in the moment, fighting the fires? What could be done better, or what will we need more of?

[Oliver Morton]

Well, I think one of the things that's rather striking is that satellites do allow you to detect fires very, very quickly now. And in some circumstances, that might be really useful for being able to get to a fire before it gets too big. Because after the fire that you stop from getting started at all, the fire that you stopped when it was still very small is the best kind of fire. Better modeling of how the fires are actually likely to spread, though no one wants to bet the farm, possibly quite literally, on the model of a fire, because they are capricious creatures. It's possible that if you buy into some thinking about a new golden age of aviation with electrically powered aircraft, which we were writing about in the paper last week, and with drones that don't need to worry about the smoke effect or just the sheer danger of taking people around, you might be able to imagine there being some parts of the world, by which I mean mainly the rich parts of the world, where that could also make a difference in the firefighting. But when I say the different parts of the world, I think one of the crucial things that may be missing at the moment is that there aren't very good mechanisms for places in the world learning from each other. Many places are seeing increased fire risk. I'm not sure that the question of what best practice is is being well enough hashed out. And so that's always something to look for. And people's motivation when it comes to fire is pretty. So I think that we could see just taking best practices from different places could give firefighters in lots of different areas a real edge. And they're going to need it because the task is getting harder. And so they're going to need every advantage they can get.

[Jason Palmer]

Oliver, thanks very much for your time.

[Oliver Morton]

Well, I'd say it was a pleasure to be here, Jason, but the circumstances slightly forbid it. Still always good to talk to you.

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[Female Workforce Analyst]

At the turn of the millennium, a patient seeing a doctor in the UK was twice as likely to see a man. But last year, the number of female physicians exceeded those of men for the first time.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Vinjeru Mukandawiri is a news editor at the Economist.

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Recently, though, things have started to shift. It seems that the most highly qualified cohort of women in history is starting to lean out.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Manjeri what does lean out mean?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Well, when you dig into the data on women at work, several indicators are beginning to move in the wrong direction. So in 2024, a study by S and P found that the share of new female executives at American listed companies fell for the first time after nearly 20 years of uninterrupted growth. Progress on boards has also leveled off. Women secured fewer board seats than they did in previous years, and that's been falling every year since 2020. We're also seeing challenges with retaining senior women. I found that at Goldman Sachs, in the last round of partner promotions in 2024, the share of new female partners slipped for the first time in a decade. And a year later, the share of female managing directors fell, too. And at the same time, at JP Morgan, another Wall street bank, you've gone from having two women considered frontrunners to succeed Jamie Dimon, the CEO, to now having an exclusively male lineup for the top job. These are not new problems. What is new is the stalling of Progress after decades of forward momentum and improvement. So for years we watched this progress and possibly mistook it for permanent change.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

You use the term lean out, which appears to give women agency. How do we know it isn't just a resurgence of sexism?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

I think it depends on the indicators that you're looking at. We've seen that ambition is shifting as well. So that's women themselves in surveys telling us how much they want promotions. For instance, McKinsey and Lean in, the nonprofit started by Sheryl Sandberg, have both tracked that women now want promotions at far lower rates than men. And that's also reversing another decade long trend. PwC have tracked similar changes in their surveys.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

So what do the stats show on men? Are fewer of them leaning into.

[Female Workforce Analyst]

No, actually, the share of men wanting promotions has continued to increase. Women's professional aspirations no longer appear to match men's, and that's because at one point their aspirations were both increasing. But by 2025, it had risen to nearly 9 in 10 men wanting promotions. But it remained flat for women. So for instance, for entry level women, just 69% of them say that they want to be promoted. That's compared with 80% of men at the same level. And a similar pattern was reported by PwC. And that's women's self reporting.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

So where does this fit into the fuller picture of female participation in the workforce?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Well, I'd say that we're seeing progression in the workplace leveling off as well as participation leveling off, and they're feeding into each other. So across the oecd, the share of women in full time work fell. It was about 78% in 2023 to 76.8% a year later. That's a small dip, but it is notable because it's the first one since PwC started tracking the data 15 years ago. But nowhere was that more evident than in the US last year, where hundreds of thousands of women left the workforce. And that amounted to the sharpest drop in participation by mothers with young children in four decades. That's quite a striking data point.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Does this have anything to do with trad wives?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Well, it's really interesting that trad wives are going viral online at this very peculiar moment in history. I mean, few women, I think, truly aspire to the aesthetic endorsed by tradwives. But researchers at King's College in London wrote a report on how they think the online appeal of homemade bread and linen aprons actually reflects women's frustration with the demands of modern work. It's less an ideological Return to tradition and more plea for balance. So they think it is a nostalgia, it's actually a warning sign.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

So talking of warning signs, what's all of this doing to the gender pay gap?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

When it comes to the gender pay gap that's opening up again in the U.S. the gender pay gap widened for two years in a row in 2024 and 2023. The gap has occasionally suffered annual setbacks, but this marked the first consecutive two year decline in 60 years. It's also widened in Canada, it's widened in France. In Switzerland and in the UK, the gap widened for women in their 40s.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

So why is all of this happening? We've talked a bit about leaning out the possibility of sexism as well. Are there other reasons at play as well?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Well, Covid is partly to blame. The pandemic did set women back on equal pay. So disproportionate numbers of low wage female workers losing their jobs during the pandemic may have artificially narrowed the gender pay gap. And some of that reasoning, widening of the gap may reflect those women piling back into the workforce. But the gap's expansion half a decade after lockdowns ended suggests that there's something else at play. So the difficulty finding childcare is another potential culprit. But we talk a lot about the cost of childcare, but not enough about the quality or availability, particularly if you're dealing with log waiting lists and staff shortages. Germany, for instance, is considered to have affordable childcare, but it still lacks more than 300,000 nursery places for children under three. And at the same time, many companies are dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Does anyone care?

[Female Workforce Analyst]

I think women and mothers have clearly noticed. So from an economist's perspective, this many women leaving the workforce represents a potential loss of productivity. That's bad for the economy economy. But it also tells us that despite all these years of progress, the balance between career advancement and family life remains a juggle that corporate environments are still grappling with.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Vieru. Depressing stuff. Thank you.

[Female Workforce Analyst]

Thanks for having me.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

In the Roaring Twenties, if more than three people wanted to dance at a bar in New York, they might have been ordered to stop having so much fun. This was the Prohibition era, and the cabaret law meant that entertainment venues had to fork out for a costly license. If not doing the Charleston could turn out to be costly. That arcane law was revived in the 1990s when Mayor Rudy Giuliani wanted to tackle crime. It pushed much of New York's nightlife underground. Yet these days, New York and Many other cities are trying to get things going again and have appointed nightlife czars.

[Daniela Raz]

So the nightlife mayor is essentially a bridge between those nighttime economy businesses, clubs, bars, restaurants, and residents who live around them.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Daniela Raz is a US Correspondent.

[Daniela Raz]

There are about a dozen or so US Cities that have essentially a nightlife mayor.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Sounds like a pretty fun job. You say a lot of cities are appointing these nightmares. Who's doing that and what are they actually supposed to be doing?

[Daniela Raz]

Yeah, so we're seeing it from big cities like New York City, Boston, all the way down to much smaller cities like Syracuse, which is, you know, kind of a college town, and Iowa City. They have multiple parts to their job. One one is to just help advocate for these businesses that exist at night. What things do they need? What red tape exists that kind of stifling their. Their business? And also sort of serving as mediators that help resolve the sort of natural tension that crops up between businesses that exist at night and the people who live around those businesses or use the city during the daytime.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

And you recently met one of these mayors, right? Can you tell me about them?

[Daniela Raz]

Grahan Reynolds is. She's officially Boston's director of the nighttime economy. She sort of has this job that's equal parts mediator, policymaker, regulator, and also kind of a troubleshooter. And so she described to me some of the stuff that she can be found doing. She describes it as R and D research and development. If there is an issue with a bar at night that's not really managing their crowds well, she'll go at 2am and sit and just observe, kind of like an anthropological thing. Observe how they're managing crowds spilling into the street and what they could be doing better. You know, if residents complain about noise, she may be nearby with a decibel meter kind of to measure actually how loud is that noise, what needs to be done about it? And then she advocates for all sorts of regulatory positions and policies that would help the nightlife thrive. And she's the first person in Boston to hold this job.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

So she's definitely a night owl, even if she's not necessarily a party animal. How important is the nighttime economy to cities like Boston or New York?

[Daniela Raz]

It varies a lot. There are cities like New York which have a obviously massive after dark scene. And then there are, you know, the smaller cities that I referenced, like Syracuse and I.O. city, that want to kind of create more of a nighttime economy, more of a nightlife scene in New York. They estimate that the nightlife economy generates something like $35 billion a year supports thousands of jobs. Obviously, it also attracts a lot of visitors.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

What problem are these nightmares really trying to solve? Is it that cities want to generate more money, or is it that there are some people who hate the nightlife and they're trying to deal with the anxiety over the complaints it generates?

[Daniela Raz]

It's a bit of both. I think a lot of it is the latter. That nightlife is kind of seen as this thing that you need to control, that you need to put punish people who are, you know, doing illegal things at night. The police need to be involved, and that's not always the best way to manage nightlife. And so these nightlife mayors have kind of come in and tried to rethink how we police and regulate all the activities that happen after dark, many of which are, you know, perfectly legal and good for people's social life and something that we should encourage.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Doesn't the US have quite unusual liquor laws as well? Yeah.

[Daniela Raz]

So after prohibition, basically, in a, you know, classic American style, a patchwork of different state level laws emerged. So you have some states that are more restrictive, some that are less, but in many, you have what are essentially quota systems where the state government at some level decides that there is a quota on the number of liquor licenses that they will approve. That can be at the municipal level, town level, entire state level, and that really limits access.

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Daniela, this seems like a surprising time to have these nighttime czars come in. All we seem to hear about these days is that people aren't going out anymore, definitely.

[Daniela Raz]

So the nightlife czars kind of, they're not trying to resolve just complaints anymore and noise complaints anymore. They're also trying to, I guess you could say, coax people off of their couches. I spoke with someone who's a, you know, nightlife industry consultant, and she described her industry as being in a war against the couch. And you can really see that at least in the U.S. so between 2003 and 2023, the amount of time that young Americans spent socializing fell by over a third. And so that kind of means that these nightlife stars now have to think beyond bars and clubs and, you know, sort of traditional nightlife. I think they kind of have to be bigger problem solvers of, like, how do you also treat what many policymakers would say is a loneliness epidemic? How do you get people out of their homes, off of their phones and doing things and socializing and building community, whether that happens at night or during the day?

[Vinjeru Mukandawiri]

Daniela, thank you very much.

[Daniela Raz]

Thank you so much.

[Jason Palmer]

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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[Jason Palmer]

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