a new study has found that catastrophic wildfires with both high economic costs and loss of human life are, indeed, happening more often, and that those fires are strongly linked to climate change. The past decade in particular has seen a significant uptick in costly, deadly fires, according to the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Fire is a natural and beneficial part of many ecosystems. But climate change can make fire seasons longer, hotter and drier. On top of that, humans have been artificially suppressing wildfire for decades, which creates more fuel for fires, and moving deeper into fire-prone areas.

That sets the stage for damaging fires in urban settings, said Calum Cunningham, a wildfire scientist at the University of Tasmania who led the new study.

“We’ve predisposed fire to occur under the most extreme conditions, where there’s lots of fuel, on the worst possible days,” Dr. Cunningham said. “That leads to catastrophic, uncontrollable fires.”

Based on those 242 wildfires, the researchers found the number of disastrous wildfires had increased more than fourfold from 1980 to 2023. Nearly half of the fires, 43 percent, were in the last 10 years of the record. Additionally, there were 43 wildfire disasters that cost more than $1 billion in that same period. (The Trump administration said in May it would stop tracking billion-dollar disasters that occur in the United States.)

The findings contrast with those of the 2016 paper, now not even a decade old. But Cristina Santín, a wildfire scientist with the Spanish National Research Council and an author of that earlier paper, was not surprised that the new study had found a different answer from hers. She was glad to see an updated look at trends in damaging wildfires.

“This is proof that things are getting worse,” Dr. Santín said. “We need to adapt to live with fire. This is our reality, and it’s not going anywhere.”

The disastrous fires were largely clustered in the western part of North America, southern Europe and southern Australia, and mostly in affluent areas with high property values — but not exclusively.

Wildfire disasters also struck in the tropics and the far north, mostly driven by unusually strong droughts, and in more rural regions like Nepal that don’t often get Western media coverage. They hit every continent except Antarctica.

They found that the fires were closely associated with “fire weather,” which includes strong, dry winds, high temperatures and drought. Other research has found that fire weather is on the rise as a result of climate change.

“It’s clear that these events are driven by extreme weather,” Dr. Cunningham said. Climate change isn’t solely responsible for all the disastrous wildfires in the study, he stressed, but “it sets the stage” for them.

“Climate change is creating more opportunities for a catastrophic fire,” he said.