In 1995 the budget for fighting fire made up 16 percent of the US Forest Service's budget. It rose to the 50 percent level in 2015 and could reach close to 70 percent by 2025.

As the need grows for more research, both Canada and the United States continue to take money away from fire science, forest management, and conservation initiatives to pay for the rising cost of fire.

In Canada, a little over half the wildfires are started by humans. In the United States, human-started wildfires account for 84 percent of all wildfires, and nearly half of all area that is burned.

For the first time in the US Forest Service's history, more than half the agency's annual appropriated budget was devoted to wildfires in 2015, up from 16 percent in 1995. Nowadays, the US Forest SErvice's annual firefighting budget routinely runs our of money before the fire season ends. With this trend of increasing costs for fighting wildfires expected to continue, two-thirds of the agency's budget will go for this kind of work by 2025.

Canada now spends as much as $1 billion each year fighting fires, five times the amount it spent in the 1990s.