Climate change has significantly increased the likelihood of the extreme conditions that fueled the recent wildfires in France and Spain, a new study has found. The analysis, conducted by the World Weather Attribution group, determined that human-caused warming made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that fueled the fires at least twice as likely in southwestern France and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain.
The study’s findings are based on an examination of the seven-day period of most dangerous fire weather in the worst-hit areas. The researchers used a measure called the Daily Severity Rating, which combines heat, dryness, wind, and landscape conditions to gauge how hard a fire would be to put out once it started. They compared this year’s conditions with observations of past summers and with a simulated pre-industrial climate.
The wildfires in France and Spain have been described as some of the worst on record in both countries, with 140,000 hectares burned in Spain and 115,000 in France since the start of the year. The fires have destroyed thousands of homes and displaced more than 250,000 people. Some blazes grew so fierce they generated their own weather systems, making them very hard to contain.
The researchers pointed to a pattern increasingly driving fire risk in the region: wet winters followed by dry springs and summers. The winter rain encourages plants to grow, and when the vegetation dries out in the heat, it becomes fuel for the flames. Clair Barnes, a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and one of the study’s authors, described the findings as
