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.
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“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. 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. “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.”
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