Reply to: Increases in the world’s most extreme wildfire events probably driven by fire size and simultaneity

replying to S. J. Schütze & V. Resco de Dios Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02742-3 (2025)

Intensifying fire weather and inappropriate land management are fuelling an increase in wildfires that threaten ecosystems, societies and the climate. We¹ recently identified ‘energetically extreme’ fire events, defined by the daily sum of fire radiative power (ΣFRP) released by fires observed by the MODIS satellites. The central finding was that energetically extreme daily fire events (≥99.99th percentile; n = 2,913) more than doubled in frequency from 2003 to 2023, with the six most extreme years occurring within the last 7 years. This highlights a worsening dimension of fire behaviour, particularly in boreal forests and temperate conifer forests, with major implications for carbon storage^2,3 and human exposure to wildfire disasters^4,5. In their recent communication, Schütze and Resco de Dios⁶ question our findings using a fundamentally different way of characterizing fires using averages and single hotspots as opposed to indexing the energy released by broader fire events. Below we explain why their alternative analysis is inappropriate for tracking changes in globally energetically extreme wildfires.