Rain is a natural process that provides a range of services to humans but certainly not all rainfall events (eg those generating floods) are beneficial to human societies. Biodiversity can also deliver a variety of services, even though there are species capable of harming humans. Likewise, the vast majority of life depends (directly or indirectly) on sunlight, yet we can get sunburn and develop skin cancer after overexposure. In the same way, wildfires can offer a range of ecosystem services (Pausas and Keeley 2019) but obviously not all fires, and not all fire regimes, provide services to humankind; indeed, wildfires can have negative (even catastrophic) impacts on society. For instance, if we build houses in a fire‐prone (or flood‐prone) area, then the inhabitants of those houses are likely to suffer negative impacts when a wildfire (or a major rainfall event) occurs. Similarly, when we substantially increase fuel loads and landscape homogeneity (eg due to a fire exclusion policy, or with a massive and poorly managed tree plantation), the impact of wildfires – especially under novel climatic conditions – can be catastrophic (eg the case of the 2017 fires in Portugal and Chile; Bowman et al. 2019).