Fire risk: how to map a growing danger in just a few minutes

The year 2025 was the worst ever for wildfires in the European Union. More than 1.07 million hectares went up in smoke in EU countries alone — an area equivalent to the island of Cyprus — and over 2.2 million hectares when considering the entire area monitored by EFFIS, the European Forest Fire Information System. This had never happened before, at least since systematic records began.

It is not a bad summer: it is a trend. The 2025 season started in March, with over 100,000 hectares burned even before the start of the meteorological spring. Almost 39% of the burned area in the EU fell within Natura 2000 sites, which are areas that, by definition, we should protect.

For those managing land, assets, facilities, or forests, the message is simple: the risk of wildfires is no longer a local and seasonal emergency; it is a structural factor that must be measured.

To understand how much an area is at risk of burning, at least four things are needed: a structural assessment of the territory (fuel, slopes, climate, human pressure), a recent history of active fires from satellite, an archive of past catastrophic events, and a projection of how the risk will change in the coming decades.

These data exist and are largely open. EFFIS publishes a structural risk index. NASA, through the VIIRS sensor and the FIRMS system, releases near-real-time thermal hotspots for the entire planet. GDACS has been cataloguing disastrous events since 2000 with green, orange, or red alerts. The CMIP6 Fire Weather Index projections indicate how the Canadian risk index will behave under different socio-economic scenarios up to 2100.

The problem is not the lack of data: it is that they reside on different portals, in different formats. Bringing these four levels together manually means days of technical work each time.

Four concrete use cases. Risk consultants and experts, for rapid screening in forest fire prevention plans. Civil protection and local administrations, for emergency planning on a municipal scale. Risk underwriters and insurance companies, to assess the exposure of assets and portfolios with quantitative scoring. Forestry managers and agricultural companies, to monitor risk and plan preventive forestry.

The indicators are aligned with TCFD and ESRS E1: the reports can be used in corporate disclosures on physical climate risks.

Three steps: draw the area on the map, configure the VIIRS window and FWI scenarios, explore the dashboard and download the report. Upon registration, you receive 10 free credits without a credit card.

Waiting to discover exposure to the next emergency is a strategy that 2025 has proven unsustainable.