Droughts occur due to climate change and elevated temperatures, which in turn may lead to other consequences as well. Imagine that a wildfire happened in the nature reserve. Predict what would happen if such an environmental shift that is so extreme and rapid Hits the nature reserve and the population of deer mice does not have time to adapt. Propose a possible solution for this problem.

Unusually large wildfires ravaged Alaska and Indonesia in 2015. The following year, Canada, California and Spain were devastated by uncontrolled flames. In 2017, massive fires devastated regions of Chile - and now, a deadly blaze in Portugal has claimed dozens of lives.

So, have wildfires actually increased globally, or does it just seem that way because we're tuned in more to bad news and social media?

Science suggests that over the past few decades, the number of wildfires has indeed increased, especially in the western United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), every state in the western US has experienced an increase in the average annual number of large wildfires over past decades.

Extensive studies have found that large forest fires in the western US have been occurring nearly five times more often since the 1970s and 80s. Such fires are burning more than six times the land area as before, and lasting almost five times longer.

A wildfire has hit southern France in 2016 forced more than a thousand people to flee their homes

What's more, wildfire season - meaning seasons with higher wildfire potential - has universally become longer over the past 40 years.

This trend is something Jason Funk, senior climate scientist with UCS, is very worried about.

"2015 was a record-breaking year in the US, with more than 10 million acres burned," he told DW in an interview. "That's about 4 million hectares, or an area of the size of the Netherlands or Switzerland."

"It's a scale we haven't seen in recent history and it's very concerning."

According to Funk, not only US forests are endangered by increasing wildfires - the trend has been that wildfires are burning more area around the world.

"In recent years, there have been big fires in Siberia and various other places around the world where we typically don't see large-scale wildfires," he said.

Projections by the UCS suggest that wildfires could get four, five and even six times as bad as they currently are within this century.

when a reversible reaction is occurring in both directions at the same rate; the products and reactants do not change in concentration. a chemical reaction where the compound is broken into its constituent parts.