Accurately assessing forest fire susceptibility (FFS) in the Similipal Tiger Reserve (STR) is essential for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and community safety. Most existing studies have primarily focused on climatic and topographical factors, while this research expands the scope by employing a synergistic approach that integrates geographical information systems (GIS), remote sensing (RS), and machine learning (ML) methodologies for identifying and assessing forest fire-prone areas in the STR and their vulnerability to climate change. To achieve this, the study employed a comprehensive dataset of forty-four influencing factors, including topographic, climate-hydrologic, forest health, vegetation indices, radar features, and anthropogenic interference, into ten ML models: neural net (nnet), AdaBag, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBTree), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Random Forest (RF), and its hybrid variants with differential evolution algorithm (RF-DEA), Gravitational Based Search (RF-GBS), Grey Wolf Optimization (RF-GWO), Particle Swarm Optimization (RF-PSO), and genetic algorithm (RF-GA). The study revealed high FFS in both the northern and southern portions of the study area, with the nnet and RF-PSO models demonstrating susceptibility percentages of 12.44% and 12.89%, respectively. Conversely, very low FFS zones consistently displayed susceptibility scores of approximately 23.41% and 18.57% for the nnet and RF-PSO models. The robust mapping methodology was validated by impressive AUROC (>0.88) and kappa coefficient (>0.62) scores across all ML validation metrics. Future climate models (ssp245 and ssp585, 2022–2100) indicated high FFS zones along the northern and southern edges of the STR, with the central zone categorized from low to very low susceptibility. Boruta analysis identified actual evapotranspiration (AET) and relative humidity as key factors influencing forest fire ignition. SHAP evaluation reinforced the influence of these factors on FFS, while also highlighting the significant role of distance to road, distance to settlement, dNBR, slope, and humidity in prediction accuracy. These results emphasize the critical importance of the proposed approach for forest fire mapping and provide invaluable insights for firefighting teams, forest management, planning, and qualification strategies to address future fire sustainability.