In the past week, hundreds of thousands of people in France and Spain were forced to evacuate their homes, many leaving in the middle of the night with only a few belongings. As evacuation orders are lifted in the coming days and weeks, some residents will return to find their towns partially destroyed, while others will find only ashes.
The fourth heat wave of this intensely hot summer is currently underway, and Europe is experiencing one of its most destructive wildfire seasons ever recorded. This has resulted in one of the largest evacuations in Europe since World War II. According to a study released on Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a scientific nonprofit, climate change has significantly increased the likelihood of such conditions. The study indicates that human-induced climate change has made fire-prone conditions at least twice as likely in France and 20 times as likely in central Spain.
“This is not an isolated event, it is part of a pattern,” said Maria Alcazar Castilla, deputy regional director of the International Federation of Red Cross in Europe. The Red Cross is coordinating disaster response efforts in both countries, providing supplies and temporary shelter for thousands.
In the months leading up to these wildfires, Western Europe faced consecutive heatwaves and a prolonged drought, which dried out trees, shrubs, and farmland, turning the landscape into a tinderbox. Scientists suggest that climate change increases the likelihood of such extreme events converging.
Last year, similar conditions led to Europe’s worst wildfire season in history, with over 2 million hectares burned by September. This year may surpass that record, with approximately 430,000 hectares already burned—about 100,000 more than at this time last year, with two months still remaining. In Spain alone, the burned area is roughly the size of London.
With more heatwaves expected in the coming weeks, the threat of additional fires remains high across the continent. Research released on Thursday concerning Southern Europe found that the number of summer days with conditions conducive to extreme fires has more than doubled in recent decades.
At the peak of the disaster this week, more than 300,000 people were displaced across France and Spain. According to Alcazar, rural areas dependent on farming and tourism have been hardest hit. “The impact to the livelihoods of people will be huge,” she stated.
The intense heat that facilitated these fires brought its own dire consequences. June was the hottest month ever recorded in Western Europe. The extreme temperatures caused nuclear reactors and trainlines to shut down and resulted in thousands of deaths across the continent within weeks.
This summer has highlighted climate change as a “national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life,” according to officials from the United Kingdom and Spain in a joint statement on Thursday.
Attribution science, which studies the connection between climate change and weather events, is a relatively nascent field. Organizations like World Weather Attribution bypass the traditional scientific publishing process, employing rapid analysis to provide timely insights. The aim is to inform the public about the role of climate change in extreme events before the news cycle shifts.
Clair Barnes, a research associate at World Weather Attribution who led the analysis, noted that this study was completed more rapidly than usual for the organization. It utilized prior research on heat and drought, along with wind speed, which are critical elements in what is termed fire weather. The team also compared this year’s fire conditions with historical weather data and simulations of a world without climate change.
“As long as we continue to emit fossil fuels into the atmosphere, those greenhouse gasses are going to continue to warm the planet more,” Barnes said. “This is just the beginning of how bad it’s going to be.”
One notable factor identified was an unusually rainy winter in January and February, sparking a burst of vegetation growth in the spring. As the prolonged drought took hold, these plants dried out, creating the fuel for the fires.
This is an example of “weather whiplash,” a phenomenon directly linked to climate change. As the atmosphere warms, it absorbs more moisture from the land, holding it for longer periods, which leads to more intense but less frequent rainfall.
Land use also plays a significant role in exacerbating wildfire conditions, according to Robert Field, a fire and climate researcher at Columbia University in New York.
In both France and Spain, abandoned farmland and a decrease in cattle grazing, which helps manage plant growth, may have contributed to the fires. In France, the fires were concentrated in the Landes de Gascogne, a coastal area with many planted pine forests. Studies of wildfires globally have shown that timber plantations can be twice as flammable as natural forests.
“I don’t think it’s like an issue of firefighting capacity or investment,” Field said. “It’s fundamentally an issue of landscape management in the face of global warming.”
Since Tuesday, firefighters have managed to partially contain many of the fires, and authorities have allowed more than 100,000 evacuees to return home in southwest France. A weak cold front is approaching Europe, which could offer a brief respite, according to Jason Nicholls, a meteorologist and international forecasting lead at AccuWeather.
However, another wave of heat could arrive as soon as this weekend, with more heat expected by mid-August, forecasts indicate. “I don’t see any drought relief in the near term, which would mean the wildfire risk will stay very elevated,” Nicholls said. The drought and heat will continue to affect France, Spain, and other parts of Central and Western Europe, including Germany and Hungary.
“I’ve been doing international forecasting for 20 years,” Nicholls said. “These wildfires have been some of the worst I’ve ever seen.”
