Cape Town is burning more often, more intensely and closer to home. As summer blazes sweep across the city’s mountains, suburbs and informal settlements, new fire statistics show a sharp rise in both vegetation and residential fires, placing a growing strain on emergency services.
Over the past eight weeks alone, the City of Cape Town has recorded significant year-on-year increases in fire incidents, stretching firefighting capacity and displacing thousands of residents across the metropolitan area.
While fires have long been part of the Western Cape’s summer landscape, experts warn that a volatile mix of heavy fuel loads, persistent winds and expanding urban edges is making Cape Town increasingly vulnerable, even before the full impact of climate change becomes clear.
According to City of Cape Town Fire and Rescue Service statistics, between December 1 and January 15, firefighters responded to 3,492 vegetation fires and rescue incidents, up from 3,213 in the same period last year. Informal residential fires rose from 315 to 332, while the sharpest increase was recorded in formal residential fires, which climbed from 210 to 244 incidents.
The human cost has also escalated. Between October and January 9, the city’s Disaster Risk Management Centre coordinated relief efforts for 6,999 people displaced or affected by fires across Cape Town.
City Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson Jermaine Carelse said the causes of fires vary widely and, in many cases, remain undetermined.
“The Fire and Rescue Service operational budget for the 2025/2026 financial year is just over R1.3bn, which covers responses to all fire incidents, whether vegetation, informal or formal residential fires,” Carelse said.
A rare convergence of climatic conditions
According to Neville Sweijd, executive director of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University, this fire season cannot be directly attributed to climate change alone. However, he said a rare convergence of climatic conditions has created what he describes as “all the right ingredients for an exceptional fire season”.
For a fire to occur, there has to be ignition. As populations grow and people move closer to natural environments, it becomes inevitable that there will be more accidental ignitions.
— Neville Sweijd, executive director of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University
“The first ingredient is rain, lots of it. The Western Cape experienced very wet conditions in both 2023 and 2024, followed by average rainfall in 2025. While this may seem counterintuitive in a fire-prone region, the abundance of rain led to extensive vegetation growth. When summer arrived, that vegetation dried out, creating an unusually high fuel load across large areas of the province,” he said.
Sweijd said a healthy climate system produces water, and water produces plant growth. “Once that growth dries out, it becomes fuel.”
The second major factor is wind.
“This season coincides with a La Niña climate pattern, which is typically associated with increased tropical activity in South Africa’s summer rainfall regions,” Sweijd said.
That activity alters atmospheric circulation further south, resulting in stronger and more persistent winds in the Western Cape.
“This has been an exceptionally windy season,” he said. “When fires burn under strong, sustained winds for days on end, they become far harder to control.”
According to Sweijd, the combination of warm temperatures, persistent winds and heavy fuel loads is particularly dangerous, allowing fires to spread rapidly and burn with greater intensity.
The human spark
Despite these conditions, Sweijd stressed that fires do not ignite spontaneously. “For a fire to occur, there has to be ignition. As populations grow and people move closer to natural environments, it becomes inevitable that there will be more accidental ignitions,” he said.
He said the expanding human footprint, combined with increasingly volatile weather conditions, have contributed to the rising number and scale of fires seen in recent years. While thousands of fires occur each summer, ranging from small flare-ups to major blazes, it is the conditions under which they burn that are becoming more concerning.
Ecological consequences
There are also growing concerns about the ecological impact of firefighting methods. The use of seawater to extinguish fires, for example, may introduce salt into already stressed ecosystems. Invasive alien vegetation, which burns hotter than indigenous plants, further complicates post-fire recovery and regeneration.
Despite the devastation, Sweijd cautions against viewing fire purely as a disaster to be suppressed at all costs. “We can’t eliminate fire, and we shouldn’t try to,” he said. “Fire is part of the natural system.”
Instead, he argues for better adaptation: controlled burns to manage fuel loads, careful planning of developments in fire-prone areas, well-resourced fire services, and an acceptance that living with fire is part of life in a warming, more variable climate.
While this season’s fires can largely be explained by climate variability, Sweijd said a climate change signal cannot be ruled out; it is simply obscured by natural fluctuations. “The variability is still louder than the trend,” he said. “But we are seeing larger extremes, and that matters for how we prepare for the future.”
City response
Carelse said the City of Cape Town has developed a comprehensive plan to address fires along the urban edge, focusing on prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
“The plan outlines emergency response protocols, post-incident assessments, education and awareness programmes, as well as community rebuilding efforts to ensure long-term resilience and ecological rehabilitation,” he said.
He added that the city has established strategically placed strike teams as a first line of defence against vegetation fires. “These teams respond to all vegetation fires, freeing up major pumpers to deal with informal, commercial and industrial fires,” Carelse said.
Carelse said data gathered over the years allows the City to identify high-risk areas and peak times.
“Based on this, strike teams equipped with bush tenders and skid units have been positioned across the metro to enable faster response and access to difficult terrain,” Carelse said.
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