Climate change made fire conditions twice as likely in South Korea blazes Study

SEOUL - Human-induced climate change made the ultra-dry and warm conditions that fanned South Korea’s deadliest wildfires in history earlier in the year twice as likely and more intense, said researchers on May 1.

Vast swathes of the country’s south-east were burned in a series of blazes in March, which killed 31 people and destroyed historic sites, including a roughly thousand-year-old temple site.

The affected area had been experiencing below-average rainfall for months and was then hit by strong winds, local officials said, following South Korea’s hottest year on record in 2024.

The hot, dry and windy conditions that fed the flames were “twice as likely and about 15 per cent more intense” due to human-caused climate change, said World Weather Attribution (WWA),a scientific network that studies the influence of global warming on extreme weather.

“South Korea’s deadliest wildfires were made much more likely by climate change,” said Dr Clair Barnes, a WWA researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

Officials said at the time that the conditions made it very hard for conventional firefighting methods to control the blazes, which leapt from pine tree to pine tree across dried-out hillsides.

“These unprecedented conditions exposed the limits of even well-developed suppression systems,” WWA said in a report on its findings.

“With fires increasingly likely to exceed control capacity, the emphasis must shift towards proactive risk reduction,” it added.

More than 62 per cent of South Korea is covered in forest, the report said, with dense tree cover especially prominent along the eastern coast and in mountainous regions – landscapes that significantly influence how wildfires spread.

Around 11 per cent of South Korea’s forested areas border human settlements, the study said.

“These areas are particularly susceptible to ignition and have accounted for nearly 30 per