Forests are a vital part of the ecological system. Forest fires are a serious issue that may cause significant loss of life and infrastructure. Forest fires may occur due to human or man-made climate effects. Numerous artificial intelligence-based strategies such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have helped researchers to predict forest fires. However, ML and DL strategies pose some challenges such as large multidimensional data, communication lags, transmission latency, lack of processing power, and privacy concerns. Federated Learning (FL) is a recent development in ML that enables the collection and process of multidimensional, large volumes of data efficiently, which has the potential to solve the aforementioned challenges. FL can also help in identifying the trends based on the geographical locations that can help the authorities to respond faster to forest fires. However, FL algorithms send and receive large amounts of weights of the client-side trained models, and also it induces significant communication overhead. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a unified framework based on FL with a particle swarm-optimization algorithm (PSO) that enables the authorities to respond faster to forest fires. The proposed PSO-enabled FL framework is evaluated by using multidimensional forest fire image data from Kaggle. In comparison to the state-of-the-art federated average model, the proposed model performed better in situations of data imbalance, incurred lower communication costs, and thus proved to be more network efficient. The results of the proposed framework have been validated and 94.47% prediction accuracy has been recorded. These results obtained by the proposed framework can serve as a useful component in the development of early warning systems for forest fires. © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.