Climate change is a global phenomenon, meaning that everyone, in some way, will feel its devastating impacts. 

And increasingly, those impacts are happening simultaneously: Over the past two decades, more than half of the world’s population has experienced simultaneous heat waves and wildfires, occurring on the same day, a study found.

Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, published their findings this week in the journal Science Advances.

The study looked at 20 years of data, from 2000 to 2019. To see who experienced a wildfire, researchers looked at who was exposed to “fire-sourced air pollution”; their data took into account hourly temperature, fire emissions, air quality, and population information.

Over those 20 years, researchers found, the number of people around the world exposed to both wildfires and heat waves, on the same days, increased by 287 million—from 761 million people per year in the first half of that time period to more than one billion people per year in the second.

That means 55.9% of the global population has experienced at least one day where a heat wave and wildfire pollution occurred in tandem.

And the number of such days is increasing, too. From 2000 to 2009, the average was one such day per person. Between 2009 and 2019, that rose to 1.7 days of co-exposure per person.

The research doesn’t only illustrate how climate change is making extreme weather more frequent. It also shows how the health impacts of these events can compound as extreme weather overlaps.

Both heat waves and wildfires can cause serious harm to our health.

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