Finland
Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, you find out about a new region aflame. Finland is battling its worst forest fire in five decades, according to AFP. While not as extensive as other fires on our list, the 710-acre blaze is nevertheless ominous because fires are so rare in Finland and other Nordic countries.
However, they’ve happened with increasingly worrisome regularity. In 2018, a 20,000-acre fire burned through Sweden. Ice-covered Greenland has caught fire in recent years. Twice, in fact. These blazes and now the one in Finland are worrisome signs that the planet’s least fire-prone areas are losing their ability to keep flames at bay.
“If climate change warms our summers like that, I’m sure it will happen more often,” Jarmo Haapanen, the person in charge of firefighting operations that extinguished the Finnish blaze, told AFP.
Update 7/30/21, 9:25 a.m.: This post has been updated with new information from fires in Lebanon as well as Manitoba.
Update 7/31/21, 2:40 p.m.: We added Finland, too. Because that’s the way things are going.
