'This Was Something New': What People in Greenland Said About Learning to Live with Wildfires

After several quieter years, wildfires have returned to western Greenland. Two recent fires have brought renewed attention to a landscape more typically associated with glaciers and melting ice sheets than flames. But when we visited the region in 2023 to investigate a series of unusual large wildfires that burned a few years earlier, local residents told us they would not be surprised if the fires came back. They remembered how dry the landscape had become before the fires, which made wildfire easier to start and harder to control. For people living around Sisimiut on Greenland's west coast, these latest events are therefore not entirely unexpected. Our research suggests wildfires may be part of a new Arctic reality. During our 2023 fieldwork we spoke to firefighters, local business owners and land-users, tourism managers and international visitors, all of whom had direct experience of the earlier fires. A common thread was that these fires were unlike anything they remembered. Older generations were particularly shocked. As one resident put it, "it was something new, even for us." Their recollections match our own analysis using satellite data and newspaper reports that found no landscape fires in western Greenland from 1995 to 2007, but more than 20 since.