Wildfires could damage or destroy nearly half a million buildings across the United States over the next several decades, according to a new study warning that America’s growing fire crisis is spreading well beyond the western states traditionally considered most vulnerable.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder estimate that between 133,200 and 449,100 structures could be damaged or destroyed by wildfires between 2024 and 2060 if current development patterns continue and additional protective measures are not implemented.
Published in Nature Communications, the study projects that the annual risk of structural losses could nearly triple by mid-century. Even more concerning, some of the sharpest increases are expected in the central and eastern United States, where communities are less prepared for catastrophic fires.
The evidence shows that America’s wildfire problem is no longer simply about forests burning more frequently. It is increasingly about where Americans build homes and how exposed those communities are to fire.
A Growing Threat Beyond the American West
To understand how wildfire threats are changing, researchers reconstructed nearly eight decades of development and fire activity, examining historical settlement patterns, burned areas, and structural damage records dating back to 1945.
They then combined those findings with three climate models to estimate how fire activity and continued construction could affect buildings through 2060.
The results showed that the amount of land burned annually across the United States could approximately double by mid-century compared with 2011–2020.
In the West, the annual burned area could increase more than threefold.
However, the researchers also identified an especially disturbing trend in areas where destructive wildfires have historically been less common.
Across the central United States, 84.1% of census tracts are projected to experience increasing structural fire risk. The same is true for 77.7% of census tracts in the West and 62.6% in the East.
Under some climate outlooks, structural fire risk could increase more than fivefold in the central United States and nearly sixfold in the East.
Although the West is expected to lose the most buildings, these projections suggest that communities across much of the country could face substantially greater danger than they have historically.
Why Eastern Wildfires Could Be More Dangerous Than Expected
One of the study’s more interesting findings concerns how destructive wildfires become once they reach developed areas.
Western fires have historically caused far more structural damage overall. However, when researchers accounted for the amount of land burned and the number of buildings exposed, fires in the eastern United States proved comparably destructive.
In other words, a wildfire does not necessarily need to consume enormous stretches of wilderness to cause catastrophic property losses.
The researchers pointed to the 2016 Chimney Tops 2 Fire in Tennessee, which spread from Great Smoky Mountains National Park into the communities surrounding Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, damaging or destroying more than 2,000 structures.
Such disasters show how fires in regions with relatively infrequent wildfire activity can have devastating consequences, particularly where communities have limited experience preparing for them.
A Tiny Fraction of Wildfires Cause Most Building Destruction
The study also revealed how unevenly wildfire destruction occurs. Reviewing historical incident records, researchers identified 205,096 structures damaged or destroyed nationwide between 2000 and 2023.
Yet only approximately 0.17% of recorded fires accounted for all structural losses.
Just five catastrophic fires caused 32% of the buildings damaged or destroyed during that period. The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires illustrate the scale of these extreme events.
According to the study, the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed approximately 16,000 structures, roughly four times the median annual number of structural losses recorded nationwide between 2001 and 2023. That single disaster represents approximately 7% to 23% of all structural losses projected nationwide between 2024 and 2060.
The evidence suggests future destruction may come not from steadily increasing annual losses but from occasional disasters capable of devastating entire communities.
Hundreds of Thousands of Buildings at Risk
Researchers found that the greatest projected wildfire dangers frequently overlap with existing economic hardship. In the West, 30% of census tracts facing the highest future fire risk also fall within areas experiencing significant socioeconomic vulnerability.
These communities commonly face additional difficulties protecting buildings, recovering from disasters, or adapting to increasing fire hazards.
Importantly, the projections assume existing development patterns and structural vulnerability remain largely unchanged. Improvements in building standards, land-use planning, and wildfire mitigation could reduce future losses.
The study’s estimates are scenarios rather than exact predictions, and unusually destructive fires could push losses beyond the projected range.
With construction continuing in fire-prone landscapes and wildfire hazards expanding into previously lower-risk regions, the researchers’ findings show that decisions about where and how Americans build today could determine the scale of future disasters.
“With an eastward expansion of risk already underway, these findings signal a narrowing window for targeted intervention,” researchers write. “With the costs of inaction rising and the window for adaptation narrowing, the path forward lies in anticipatory governance, guided by data, coordinated across scales, and attuned to social context.”
The recent study, “Fire risk to U.S. structures nearly triples by mid-century,” appeared in Nature Communications.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com