Forest fires pose a great threat to the global ecological environment as well as human life and the safety of property. Formulating effective policies for preventing forest fires is not only a scientific concern but also an urgent need for government management. Canada and China both have extensive forest areas but have different fire management strategies. Canada primarily focuses on fire suppression while China pays more attention on fire prevention. This difference led to significant discrepancies in the forest fire regimes between the two countries, providing an opportunity to explore the impact of fire management policies on forest fire. By analyzing the fire occurrences in Canada and China since 1990, combining the fire prevention funds and fire management strategies, this paper discussed the influence of different policies on fire occurrence. Previously, Canada’s forest suppression strategy has been widely recognized internationally, but recent widespread fires indicate that its fire management policy may still require further improvement to cope with future global warming. Although China’s fire prevention strategy can effectively control current forest fires, the lack of fundamental theories on forest fires and the backwardness of fire prevention technology and equipment may increase the likelihood of major forest fires in the future. As global warming continues to intensify in the future, the length of the forest fire season and the intensity of fires will increase, making it urgent to develop more effective forest fire prevention and suppression policies to achieve sustainable development.

Understanding how fires impact the carbon cycle is crucial for developing effective climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Although there is a substantial global body of research on fire carbon cycle (FCC), there are relatively few studies offering graphical and quantitative analyses. To assess the trends in FCC research from 1989 to 2023, we performed a bibliometric analysis using the Science Citation Index—Expanded database. A total of 2408 publications were analyzed in this study. The results revealed that from 1989 to 2023, the quantity of publications in the field of FCC studies increased significantly. However, the average number of citations per paper per year first increased rapidly, followed by a slow increase, and then a decline. The top 10 institutions contributing to FCC research were predominantly based in the United States and the United Kingdom, with these countries also leading in the number of publications and citations. Beyond the keywords “fire” and “carbon” used in collecting literature, “climate-change” and “dynamic” were the top two most prominent research focuses. The topic of research has shifted from 1989 to 2023. Climate, vegetation, and emissions were the basic themes, which were important but not well developed, and will be the focus of future research. Along with climate change, research will focus more and more on fire emissions and modeling.