Forest Fires in Nepal: Fire Season, High-Risk Districts & Monitoring

Every dry season, plumes of smoke rise from Nepal's sal forests in the Tarai and the pine and mixed broadleaf forests of the mid-hills. In Nepali these blazes are called ban dadhelo (वन डढेलो) or, in the more literary Sanskrit-derived term, davanal (दावानल) — both meaning forest fire. With forests and other wooded land covering about 44.7 per cent of the country (Forest Resource Assessment 2015), fire is among Nepal's most widespread environmental hazards, damaging timber and biodiversity, destroying homes and fodder, and blanketing cities in hazardous smoke.

Unlike lightning-driven fire regimes in some countries, almost all forest fires in Nepal are started by people. Officials of the Department of Forests and Soil Conservation (DoFSC) and researchers consistently attribute the great majority of ignitions to human activity: deliberate burning to encourage fresh grass for livestock, escaped agricultural residue fires, careless discarding of cigarettes or cooking fires, and burning by hunters and collectors of non-timber forest products. Once lit, fires spread quickly through the deep leaf litter that accumulates in community and national forests during the dry months.

The costs are serious and recurring. Smoke from thousands of simultaneous fires in late March and April 2021 pushed Kathmandu to the top of global air-pollution rankings and prompted temporary school closures, while blazes regularly kill firefighters and villagers. In March 2009, 13 Nepal Army personnel died battling a wind-driven fire in Ramechhap district — among the deadliest single incidents on record — and state media count more than one hundred forest-fire deaths in the five years to 2025.

Nepal's forest fire season follows the country's monsoon calendar. Fires begin appearing from around November–December (Mangsir–Poush in the Bikram Sambat calendar), once post-monsoon vegetation has dried out and winter rain — increasingly scarce in recent years — fails to wet the forest floor. Activity builds through February and March, peaks in the hot, windy pre-monsoon months of March to May (Chaitra–Jestha), and collapses only when monsoon rains arrive, usually in the second week of June.

Within that window, April is typically the single worst month. ICIMOD (the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) describes the pattern plainly: fires in Nepal have an early onset in December, peak in April and recede with the monsoon in June. DoFSC records presented during Forest Fire Awareness Week — observed each year from 15 to 21 March (Chaitra 1–7) — show roughly nine in ten recorded incidents packed into the spring weeks from mid-February onwards, when temperatures climb, humidity drops and dry biomass peaks.

Winter drought is the strongest predictor of a bad fire year. ICIMOD's analysis shows a close correlation between drought severity maps and forest fire risk maps: a failed winter rain, as in 2020-21, 2022-23 and 2024-25, leaves forests tinder-dry weeks earlier than normal. In the first four months of 2023 alone, the DoFSC recorded 1,816 forest fire incidents — a rise of about 76.5 per cent on the whole of the previous year — after an exceptionally dry winter.

Fire risk in Nepal is heavily concentrated in the western Tarai, the inner Tarai valleys and the adjoining Chure (Siwalik) foothills, where dry sal-dominated forests, high spring temperatures and long droughts combine. According to ICIMOD's satellite record, seven districts — Banke, Bardiya, Chitwan, Dang, Kailali, Kanchanpur and Surkhet — each experienced more than 1,500 forest fires between 2012 and 2024, making them the most fire-prone districts in the country. Adding Parsa, Salyan, Doti and Dadeldhura brings the list of districts with over 1,000 recorded fires in that period to eleven.

Government risk rankings match the satellite data closely. Ahead of the 2026 dry season, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) categorised nine districts as high-risk for forest fire — Banke, Bardiya, Chitwan, Dang, Kailali, Kanchanpur, Parsa, Salyan and Surkhet — and named a further thirteen districts as significantly at risk: Achham, Arghakhanchi, Bara, Dadeldhura, Doti, Gorkha, Jajarkot, Kapilvastu, Makwanpur, Nawalpur, Pyuthan, Sindhuli and Udayapur.

Geography explains the ranking. Banke, Bardiya, Kailali and Kanchanpur contain large blocks of protected sal forest (including Banke and Bardiya national parks and Shuklaphanta), Chitwan and Parsa share the Chitwan–Parsa forest complex, and Dang, Surkhet and Salyan sit in dry inner-Tarai valleys where a single escaped fire can run through continuous forest for days. Hill districts such as Sindhupalchok, Pyuthan and Terhathum also record many smaller fires in pine forest and shrubland.

Two kinds of numbers circulate, and both are correct in their own terms. Satellite-based counts, compiled by ICIMOD from NASA sensor detections, are the larger: more than 38,000 fire incidents were detected across Nepal between 2001 and 2019, and from 2012 to 2024 the country averaged about 3,000 detected fires a year. Officially recorded incidents are fewer: the DoFSC counted 13,622 forest fire incidents nationwide in the twelve years from 2070 to 2082 BS (roughly 2013/14 to 2025/26 AD), a tally announced during Forest Fire Awareness Week in March 2026.

The worst year on record was 2016 (2072–73 BS). According to reporting compiled by UN-SPIDER, the United Nations space-applications platform, the 2016 fires killed at least 15 people and reportedly affected some 13,000 square kilometres — with a record number of blazes burning within the span of a few weeks. The 2021 season was almost as severe: ICIMOD counted more than 6,000 forest fires that year, the worst since its satellite record began, and 2024 brought more than 5,000.

The trend points upward. ICIMOD notes that the frequency of forest fires in Nepal has more than doubled over the past decade, driven by hotter, drier springs and failed winter rains. In recent DoFSC data Sudurpaschim Province recorded the largest share of incidents, followed by Bagmati and Karnali — showing fire is now a nationwide problem, not just a Tarai one.

Nepal has had a national, satellite-based Forest Fire Detection and Monitoring System since 2012. It was developed by ICIMOD together with the Department of Forests (now the DoFSC) under the SERVIR-Himalaya initiative — now SERVIR-HKH — a joint programme of NASA (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and USAID (the US Agency for International Development). The system automatically ingests active-fire detections from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensors aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, which pass over Nepal twice daily, applying NASA's fire-detection algorithm at ICIMOD's own receiving station.

A later upgrade added data from VIIRS (the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite, whose 375-metre resolution picks up smaller fires and maps large fire perimeters more precisely than MODIS's 1-kilometre footprint. When an overpass detects a fire, the system automatically attaches the district, land-cover type, elevation and slope, and pushes an SMS and email alert to registered users in the affected area — typically within about 20 minutes. Subscribers have included District Forest Officers and focal persons of FECOFUN (the Federation of Community Forestry Users, Nepal) across all 77 districts, and the DoFSC monitors the feed from a control room at its Kathmandu headquarters.

The public portal (nepal.spatialapps.net/NepalForestFire) maps historical and near-real-time fire incidents, filterable by province, district, protected area and date, and offers email alert subscriptions. In May 2023, after that season's 76.5 per cent surge, ICIMOD added a two-day fire outlook — a forecast index of fire danger across Nepal's forests that helps managers pre-position crews, restrict burning or plan controlled burns. A companion mobile app, Nepal Forest Fire Detection and Alert, supports citizen reporting, and registered officials can log damage assessments and casualties directly into the system.

Anyone — journalist, community forest user group member or worried resident — can check active fires over Nepal for free using NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System). FIRMS maps near-real-time active-fire data from the same MODIS and VIIRS sensors used by Nepal's national system, generally within about three hours of the satellite observation. Each dot is a thermal anomaly with its brightness, confidence level and detection time listed; VIIRS points are precise to about 375 metres.

FIRMS is a detection tool, not a verification tool: a hotspot may be an agricultural burn, a brick kiln or a small controlled fire, and clouds or the gap between overpasses can delay detection. For Nepal-specific context — district tallies, season statistics and the official fire outlook — the ICIMOD/DoFSC portal is the more authoritative source, while NASA's Worldview site lets users view the underlying satellite imagery and smoke plumes.

Three forces are pushing Nepal's fire numbers up. First is climate: winters are becoming warmer and drier, and prolonged winter droughts leave forests combustible weeks earlier than in past decades. Second is fuel: community forestry has expanded dense forest cover, while rural out-migration means fewer people collect litter, graze animals or maintain fire lines, so dry biomass accumulates. Third is behaviour: intentional and careless burning continues largely unpunished, and enforcement of forest law against fire-setting is rare.

Response capacity remains thin. Nepal has no dedicated aerial firefighting fleet; suppression falls to district forest offices, community forest user groups, Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and the Nepal Army working with hand tools, fire beaters and cut fire lines. The NDRRMA coordinates preparedness across the three tiers of government, issues seasonal risk lists and runs pre-season awareness campaigns, while the DoFSC control room triages satellite alerts to district offices.

Prevention is therefore where the leverage lies: pre-season construction of fire lines, controlled early-season burning to remove litter, penalties for illegal burning, and rapid community response to SMS alerts in the first hours of a fire. The monitoring architecture — ICIMOD's detection system, the two-day fire outlook and NASA FIRMS — now gives Nepal some of the best fire information in South Asia; the persistent challenge, as every April shows, is turning early detection into early suppression on steep, road-poor terrain.