Hangar-backed Cornea Releases 2025 Wildfire Season Report Detailing Record-Breaking Human, Economic, and Systemic Impacts

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The 2025 wildfire season marked a turning point in how wildfire risk is experienced, managed, and paid for, according to a new comprehensive analysis released today by Cornea. The report finds that wildfire impacts are no longer seasonal or geographically contained, with catastrophic winter fires, worsening smoke-related health outcomes, and escalating costs flowing through utilities, insurance markets, and housing systems to consumers.

More than 65,000 wildfires burned over 5 million acres in the United States in 2025, but the year’s defining features were not acreage. The LA fires in January - among the most destructive wildfire events on record - killed more than 30 people, destroyed over 16,000 structures, and generated more than $40 billion in insured losses, underscoring both the collapse of the traditional “fire season” framework and the human and economic cost.

At the same time, the report highlights “zombie fires” in Canada, where multi-year drought conditions allowed fires from previous seasons to smolder underground through winter and re-ignite in spring, effectively eliminating the traditional winter recovery period.

The report documents how wildfire smoke emerged as a perennial public-health threat. Excess-mortality analyses estimate hundreds of smoke-related deaths in LA alone, while smoke from large Canadian fires repeatedly degraded air quality across the U.S. Upper Midwest during May and June, producing some of the worst air quality levels globally for days.

Wildfire costs are increasingly borne by consumers rather than confined to disaster zones. Utilities passed over $27 billion in wildfire mitigation and liability costs into electricity rates, while insurers continued retreating from high-risk markets, expanding reliance on last-resort coverage and increasing financial strain on homeowners in fire-prone regions.

“What 2025 made unmistakably clear is that wildfire is no longer a seasonal or regional problem—it’s a systemic risk that cuts across public health, infrastructure, housing, and financial markets,” said Josh Mendelsohn, Lead Investor at Hangar. “Reducing future losses will require shifting from reactive suppression to sustained investment in land resilience, community hardening, and better risk intelligence.”

The full report, 2025 Wildfire Season: Record Breaking Human, Economic, and Systemic Impacts, is available here.

About Cornea: Hangar’s Cornea provides predictive analytics tools for wildfire intelligence and land management, supporting effective risk management and long-term resilience at scale.