Aug 28, 03:17 AM

Climate Change Fuels Europe’s Worst Wildfire Season on Record

Europe is enduring its worst wildfire season since records began in 2006, with more than one million hectares already burned across the European Union, according to the bloc’s Copernicus fire-monitoring service. Spain has suffered the largest losses, with over 400,000 hectares destroyed this year—including 362,000 hectares in just the first three weeks of August—while neighbouring Portugal has seen about 270,000 hectares burned and four deaths. The scale of the blazes has led Madrid to deploy 500 soldiers and prompted cross-border assistance, including French crews operating in northern Spain. A rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution consortium found that the fires that swept Greece, Turkey and Cyprus this summer were 22 percent more intense and ten times more likely than they would have been without human-driven warming. Those eastern-Mediterranean blazes killed 20 people, forced 80,000 to evacuate and scorched more than one million hectares. Researchers say heat exceeding 40 °C, prolonged drought and strong Etesian winds—conditions now expected roughly once every 20 years instead of once a century—were decisive factors. The health impact of the expanding fire footprint is becoming more apparent. The University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index reports that Canada’s record 2023 wildfire season pushed fine-particle pollution there up by more than 50 percent and drove a 20 percent jump in U.S. levels, undermining decades of clean-air progress. Separately, the EU health agency warned that climate change is also fuelling a “new normal” of mosquito-borne diseases such as West Nile virus after a record number of cases this year. Scientific evidence points to a broader trend: a study in the journal Science concludes that the number of people directly exposed to wildland fires worldwide grew by 40 percent between 2002 and 2021. Researchers and policymakers say the findings underscore the urgency of accelerating emissions cuts and investing in fire-management and public-health measures as warming continues to lengthen and intensify fire seasons on both sides of the Atlantic.

Written with ChatGPT .

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