This is a very comprehensive, timely, and informative report on global wildfire activity during 2025–2026. The report provides a broad overview of wildfire activity and impacts over the past year, while also examining the drivers, attribution, and future changes of several focal wildfire events. Bringing together such a wide range of datasets, analyses, modelling approaches, and regional assessments into a single report clearly represents a substantial amount of work. The continued development of the State of Wildfires Report, including the incorporation of new datasets and methods in this edition, is particularly appreciated. Overall, the manuscript is well organized. I only have a few minor comments and suggestions, as outlined below:

L162: The statement that “global total burned area (BA) and emissions are decreasing” may need some clarification. While global burned area has shown a clear declining trend, global fire emissions have remained relatively stable, with previous studies reporting only a statistically non-significant decreasing trend (e.g., Zheng et al., 2021). I suggest distinguishing these contrasting trends, which may also better support the following discussion of increasingly severe regional fire impacts (e.g., increasing forest fire activity).

L384–386: If I understand correctly, the GFED5 fire emissions used in this study consist of two components: the standard GFED5 record through 2022 and GFED5-NRT (Chen et al., 2026) for 2023–2026. Although GFED5-NRT relies on different data sources and methodological approaches to extend the historical record, it has been shown to be broadly consistent with the standard GFED5 product. I suggest explicitly clarifying these two components and their respective temporal coverage so that readers can clearly understand the composition of the GFED5 emission record used in this study.

L3012–3021: One potential direction for future editions of the State of Wildfires Report could be to complement the long-term climate projections with a near-term outlook for the upcoming fire season. Given the annual nature of the report, it may be valuable to explore whether probabilistic forecasts of wildfire activity (e.g., burned area or the likelihood of above-normal fire activity) could be provided for the following fire season. If feasible, this could be an interesting avenue to consider in future editions, potentially further enhancing the practical value of the report for preparedness and early warning.

References 

Zheng, B., Ciais, P., Chevallier, F., Chuvieco, E., Chen, Y., & Yang, H. (2021). Increasing forest fire emissions despite the decline in global burned area. Science advances, 7(39), eabh2646.

Chen, Y., van der Werf, G. R., Mu, M., van Wees, D., Hall, J. V., Giglio, L., ... & Randerson, J. T. (2026). Tracking recent extremes and interannual variability of global fire emissions using a near-real-time extension to the Global Fire Emissions Database. Earth System Science Data Discussions, 2026, 1-25.

The manuscript presents an extensive overview of the wildfire year 2025/26 (March-Feb), examining both the harm caused by fires (casualties, evacuations, damage to property, air quality) as well as their long-term impacts on ecosystems (inlcuding protected areas) and climate. The manuscript exploits a large number of data sets, e.g., remotely sensed burned area, fire size and intensity, and derived carbon emission products. State-of-the-art climate, weather, and fire models are used for prediction and attribution studies. The global state of wildfires is described, and three focus regions are selected for detailed understanding and verification of findings by means of regional expert panels. A novelty of this "State of Wildfires" report is that protected areas are evaluated separately.

The report describes that although burned area continues to decrease globally, there is an increase in extreme fires in different parts of the world, particularly the boreal forests, and in 2025/26 extreme fires occurred in historically unaffected regions. Using climate projections, the report shows that the exceptional situations observed in the three focus regions are much more likely to occur due to (anthropogenic) climate change, and that the probability will increase further in the future. The report points to the importance of combining hydroclimatic indicators, which set the stage for fires by influencing the fuel load, with fire weather data for a more complete assessment of fire risk. 

The team builds on the experiences of the previous "State of Wildfires" reports (as mentioned in Sect. 7.2), ensuring continuity and comparability by making only small changes compared to earlier reports. Despite its appreciable length, the report reads well and the individual contributions of authors are well integrated. Judging by the high degree of consistency, it has gone through various rounds of internal review, making for a high-quality report that merits publication in ESSD without the necessity of significant revisions.

Some general comments to the study:

1. The report explicitly reports on fire C emissions, but does not discriminate between emissions of CO2 and CH4, despite the big difference in global warming potential (GWP). The emission factors of CH4 and CO2 depend heavily on fuel characteristics and change with changing fire patterns: e.g., late-dry-season (LDS) burning of dry, highly flammable grasses in southern African savannahs have a smaller CH4:CO2 ratio than early-dry-season fires. The fire C emissions may be larger in LDS (due to higher fuel loads), yet the total GWP is smaller because most C emissions are in the form of CO2, see, e.g. a critical note by Paul Laris and references therein (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25141-1). Do the authors account for differences in GWP of C emissions in their assessment?

2. The decision to publish the regional reports separately is appreciated, because it makes the regional findings and efforts more visible and can receive credit in their own right.

3.On line 796 it is mentioned that MERRA2 is used for Northwest Iberia, whereas for all other regions, ERA5 is used. Can the authors elaborate on their decision to use another model in this particular region?

Please find additional minor comments below.

ll.123-124: "(...) while BA extent in the region is 46 times greater." -> This subsentence follows two statements on (increased) likelihoods, which affects its readability. I suggest to write this in a new sentence to form a bridge to the subsequent statements on "record or high-ranking BA and fire C emissions".

ll.218-219: "above-average global BA" and "BA extent are both projected to increase" -> This is in contrast to the observation that globally, BA is decreasing. If these statements pertain to the Mediterranean ecoregions (or some other region), this may need to be more clearly stated.

l. 1003: Remove spurious "out"

l. 1115: "half below average" -> Do you mean "half of the average value?" Please rephrase for clarity.

ll. 1190-1208: These paragraphs present absolute totals and differences in addition to relative differences and are somewhat difficult to read. Please consider rephrasing or putting the numbers into a table or figure for clarity.

ll. 1284-1289: "Industrial sites (...) at regional scale." -> These are important considerations of the limitations of the data set, but it appears at an unexpected location, as this might be more suited in either the section describing data sets or in the discussion. In any case, the statement should be made more specific regarding how the static mask "could potentially affect the analysis at regional scale."

l. 1616. "wildfire activity, driven primarily by extensive BA and emissions in Canada." -> This is a case of reversed logic: extensive BA and emissions in Canada are what define the extreme wildfire acitivity, i.e., more like symptoms than drivers. Please rephrase the statement, possibly by replacing "driven primarily by" with "characterised by".

l. 1850: "that produced" -> "with"

ll.3055-3056: "These political commitments provided evidence that countries need better data..." -> Strictly, the commitments only show that nations are joined in wishing for better data; it doesn't prove that they need it. Please revise the statement accordingly.