#wildfires

#wildfires

Last year was difficult for Los Angeles chefs and restaurateurs. Many entered 2025 hoping for reprieve from previous setbacks and pitfalls: years of inflation, diminished business due to local entertainment-industry strikes and fewer productions, COVID-era back rent coming due, increases in the cost of labor and rent. But 2025 proved to be even more disastrous, compounding existing issues. It started with wildfires across the region, which destroyed thousands of Southern California homes, restaurants, bars and other businesses.

Ten English fire services tackled a record number of grassland, woodland and crop fires during what was the UK's hottest spring and summer on record, figures show. In total nearly 27,000 wildfires were dealt with by fire services in England during the prolonged dry weather of 2025, according to analysis by PA Media. One fire chief said the summer was one of the most challenging that crews had ever faced and the frequency and intensity of the wildfires was putting a strain on resources.

PG&E, the utility company that last week reintroduced one third of San Franciscans to the Dickensian joys of wearing coats indoors and tabulating the losses of spoiled food by candlelight, is not popular. Last night, in a move that would be on the nose if you could locate your face in the dark, a planned power outage was rudely preceded by an unplanned power outage.

Described as the "western hemisphere's most sophisticated weather-observing and environmental-monitoring system," the GOES-R satellite series is capable of providing data from diverse weather phenomena. This year, it captured several images of Hawaii's Kilauea volcano, which erupted from December 2024 to February 2025. In March, the lava fountain reached heights of over 1,000 feet, the highest it's been in about 50 years.

2025 was another historic year-making headlines for disastrous wildfires in Los Angeles, catastrophic floods in Texas, and deadly heatwaves in Europe and Asia. But it was also a year of collaboration-with researchers, scientists, policymakers, students and others coming together to share ideas and plans to address the effects of climate change, during Climate Week NYC and COP30, among other initiatives.

Over the course of 2025, millions of images have been filed through our picture system from agencies who cover news all over the world. The images taken by their teams of photojournalists, filed through local editors and international desk editors, are a mainstay of our coverage of international news, and enable the production of reactive news stories as well as features and visual essays.

Southern California Edison did not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance of its aging transmission lines that it told regulators was necessary and began billing to customers in the four years before the Jan. 7 wildfires, according to a Times review of regulatory filings. Edison told state regulators in its 2023 wildfire prevention plan that it believed its giant, high-voltage transmission lines, which carry bulk power across its territory, "generally have a lower risk of ignition" than its smaller distribution wires, which deliver power to neighborhoods.

The 33 percent drop was recorded despite the wildfires that ravaged wealthy neighbourhoods in Los Angeles in January, burning more than 9,308 hectares (23,000 acres), destroying homes and businesses and forcing thousands to flee. Swiss Re put the insured losses from the inferno at $40bn, labelling it the globe's costliest wildfire to date. That single event was a major contributor to the $107bn in insured losses from natural catastrophes in 2025.

After 24 days of burning, his entire life looked different. Between tours, the famed DJ and dance music producer, born Ryan Raddon, spent the majority of his time at Palisades hot spots like the Village. Now he frequents Santa Monica and Brentwood by force. Of the 30 families in his church, only four of their houses remain standing, including his. Unfortunately, his brother's house was lost to the fires.

The year began with the art world-like much of the rest of the world-holding its breath, waiting to see what America's newly re-elected president, Donald J. Trump, had on his Washington to-do list. Meanwhile, on America's other coast, a series of wildfires in and around Los Angeles burned up around 60,000 acres, killing hundreds of people, displacing thousands more, and consuming architectural landmarks as well as untold works of art.

J ulian Canadien, a Dene man from Kakisa, Northwest Territories, is swarmed by black flies while he pulls weeds from the soil beneath his feet. The bugs don't bother him much. He's the only paid employee at the community garden, where his job is to prune and clear the rows of vegetables, water the produce, and churn the compost. And he likes his job.

Breathless as if the smoke still lingered, on a recent morning she bundled her effervescent 3-year-old daughter, Luna, into her car seat for the two-hour trek from her aunt's house in Riverside, where they have lived for much of the past year, back to their family's 1909 Craftsman home. It stands steps from the Eaton fire burn scar - untouched, but uninhabitable.

The remaining carbon budget available to humans is running out, according to new research. The 1.5C global warming limit which is the top amount of emissions that can be put into the atmosphere above pre-industrial levels is nearly exhausted according to the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute study. And this year, fossil fuel carbon emissions are expected to hit record highs, increasing by 1.1 per cent globally. At the current rate, humans will have used up the 1.5C limit within four years spelling danger for future generations dealing with the repercussions of climate change.

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.

What's the weather like over there? asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains, in his distinctive, mellifluous voice perhaps a little hoarser than it once was and his preoccupation with the climate. It's a dark evening in London but a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt.

A popular ski resort town in Colorado is adopting a new AI Smart City Solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it better detect wildfires, as well as update a range of other city services. Vail is expanding its firefighting toolbox as hotter, more arid weather with climate change raises wildfire risk in the western US. Colorado has suffered 11 of the 20 largest fires in state history just within the last five years.

"The impacts of climate change are proven and undeniable,"

Most garden tasks are just about making the place look aesthetically pleasing - but there's one that is a legal obligation and could even be a matter of life or death. This is débroussaillement (pronounced day-broo-say-eh-mon) - the French term for clearing away brush, vegetation and dead leaves. The reason that this is important is related to wildfires - and in fact, homeowners in some parts of France, where wildfires are common, have a legal obligation to do this every year.

In January 2025, Los Angeles suffered an unspeakable wildfire tragedy, destroying at least 17,000 structures, and with tens of thousands of people forced out of their homes. Almost immediately, government officials declared a state of emergency and laid out a path to rebuild " like for like." However, in the aftermath of such disasters when rebuilding from the ground up, is "like for like" the best way to proceed? These disasters provide an opportunity to future-proof our neighborhoods for the next generation of environmental challenges.

Los Angeles County supervisors criticized the long-awaited $1.9-million outside investigation on government failures during the January wildfires as full of gaping holes after outcry from residents who say the report failed to answer their key question: Why did evacuation alerts come so late for so many? "I've heard from many residents, some of whom are in the audience, who share that this report leads to more questions than answers, and, quite frankly, a lot of anger,

Los Angeles's restaurants continue to face difficult headwinds, starting in 2020 with the onset of a global pandemic and exacerbating with the Hollywood labor strikes in 2023, which led to an industry-wide slowdown that's continued into 2025. From the lingering impacts of the Hollywood strikes to increased costs (labor, rent, ingredients, etc.), many variables continue to batter restaurant owners who operate on razor-thin margins.

The wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January destroyed more than 18,000 homes and other structures, left dozens of people dead and led to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of others. Among the most severely affected areas was the unincorporated city of Altadena, home to many visual artists who lost their houses and studios. Recovery for artists and everyone else impacted by the 14 separate wildfires throughout the region that month has been a slow, traumatic process.

In fall 2017, Piccin and his wife lost their ranch house when the Tubbs fire roared through Northern California's famed wine region. Contractors found themselves in high demand and overbooked, and the one the couple hired abandoned the project halfway through. In the time it took to find a new builder, the price tag rose by a third to $2.4 million, forcing the Piccins to sell a rental property they owned to pay the bill.

Months of negative news have triggered a tough summer for tourism in Los Angeles, deepening the economic woes for a city buffeted by natural disasters and immigration raids. Tourist arrivals fell by close to 10% this season, according to the latest numbers from Visit California. The region's economy and image suffered significant setbacks this year. Shocking images of the destructive Eaton and Palisades fires in January, followed by the immigration crackdown in June, made global news and repelled visitors.

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) has had its busiest summer since the extreme heat of 2022, with 83 wildfires in the capital between June and August. This was more than the summers of 2023 and 2024 combined, although was much lower than the 161 wildfires recorded in summer 2022. The most significant fire saw 25 fire engines and about 125 firefighters called to a grass fire in Dagenham on 14 July, at the height of the third heatwave of the year.

This summer was one of the hottest on record in Europe, with temperatures soaring above 46 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit), triggering wildfires and causing the deaths of thousands of people, particularly among the elderly. Climate change is likely to be responsible for 68 percent, or about 16,500, of additional heat-related deaths, according to new research from the Grantham Institute Climate Change and the Environment in London, United Kingdom.

During a 2024 wildfire season described as unprecedented, the tiny central Idaho town of Stanley and nearby Redfish Lake Lodge narrowly missed incineration by two fires: the Bench Lake and then the Wapiti blazes. It took heroic firefighting efforts and favorable turns in weather conditions for the town a mountain mecca for tourists from around the world to survive without the loss of a single life or home.

In howling winds and choking smoke during the January fires that devastated Altadena and Pacific Palisades, more than 1,100 incarcerated firefighters cleared brush and dug fire lines, some for wages of less than $30 per day. Those firefighters could soon see a major raise. On Thursday, California lawmakers unanimously approved a plan to pay incarcerated firefighters the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour while assigned to an active fire, a raise of more than 700%.