Additional Coverage:
- Human-caused climate change made Spanish, French fires much more likely, scientists calculate (apnews.com)
Firefighters, local residents, and volunteers continued battling flare-ups Thursday as hotspots smoldered in southwestern France amid ongoing wildfires. These blazes are part of a broader pattern of extreme fire weather linked to climate change, according to two new scientific studies.
Researchers from World Weather Attribution reported that human-driven climate change has drastically increased the likelihood of the intense heat and dryness fueling these fires. In Spain, where a record-setting wildfire recently raged, climate change made such conditions 20 times more probable.
In France, the chance of extreme fire weather doubled. Over the past 26 years, warming has tripled the risk in Spain and raised it by 40% in France.
A separate study published this week, conducted independently before the latest fires erupted, shows that Southern Europe now experiences more than twice as many days with extreme fire-prone weather compared to previous decades. These days are also about 50% more intense than those recorded between 1981 and 2010.
Both studies evaluated key factors contributing to fire risk, including temperature, drought severity, humidity, and wind conditions. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and coordinator of World Weather Attribution, called the change in Spain’s fire weather “extremely strong” – among the most significant she has seen.
Spain’s hottest summer on record, combined with an unusually wet January that spurred vegetation growth followed by severe drought, created abundant fuel for wildfires. Land abandonment further compounded the risk by leaving vegetation unmanaged.
In France’s Bordeaux region, dense pine forests similarly provided ample material for fires.
While the rapid analysis from World Weather Attribution has not yet undergone peer review-the gold standard in science-the researchers used established methods. Many of their reports are later published in peer-reviewed journals.
By comparing recent fire weather severity to what it would have been had global temperatures remained 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (the approximate rise since pre-industrial times), Otto’s team quantified how fossil fuel emissions have intensified fire risks. Their findings align with long-standing knowledge among fire scientists that extreme heat and drought make fires more likely to ignite and spread rapidly.
Jacob Bendix, a fire scientist at Syracuse University not involved in the studies, said, “This study provides numbers to confirm what fire scientists already knew… these events were tragically predictable.”
The second study, appearing in the journal Scientific Reports, highlights a troubling trend: while fire frequency and burned acreage in Southern Europe had declined from the 1980s through 2018 due to improved fire management, climate change has recently reversed these gains. Raúl Cordero of the University of Groningen, lead author of that research, emphasized that no amount of resources can fully counteract fire spread under extreme weather conditions driven by today’s climate.
John Abatzoglou, a fire scientist at the University of California Merced, echoed this sentiment: “Climate change is not just a future problem, it’s already here.”
Otto concluded with a stark warning: “We need to stop burning fossil fuels. As long as we keep doing so, global temperatures-and thus fire weather conditions-will worsen. There are limits to what we can adapt to.”
These findings underscore the urgent need for climate action to mitigate increasingly severe wildfire risks across Southern Europe and beyond.