Study: Climate change made Iberian wildfires 40 times more likely
Analysis by World Weather Attribution says heat, dryness and winds were about 30% more intense than preindustrial levels as hundreds of blazes tore through Spain and Portugal in July and August
A new analysis has concluded that climate change made the extreme weather conditions that fueled this summer’s wildfires on the Iberian Peninsula about 40 times more likely to occur.
The study, released Thursday by World Weather Attribution, or WWA, found that the combination of unusually hot, dry and windy conditions across Spain and Portugal was roughly 30% more intense than comparable conditions in the preindustrial era. Those conditions helped hundreds of fires ignite and spread rapidly during July and August.
Temperatures in parts of the two countries rose above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) while strong winds pushed flames across landscapes, the WWA analysis said. The blazes killed eight people, prompted more than 35,000 evacuations and scorched more than 640,000 hectares (about 1.58 million acres) — roughly two-thirds of Europe’s total burned area this year, according to officials and aggregated data cited by the study.
Most of the fires were under control by early autumn as temperatures dropped considerably, authorities said. Emergency services and local governments have been conducting assessments of damage, managing ongoing hotspots and enabling residents to return where it is safe.
"Hotter, drier and more flammable conditions are becoming more severe with climate change, and are giving rise to fires of unprecedented intensity," said Clair Barnes, a researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, who was quoted in the WWA release.
WWA is a scientific collaboration that assesses the influence of human-caused climate change on individual extreme weather events. Its findings are based on a combination of observational data and climate model simulations designed to estimate how the probability and intensity of extreme weather would differ in a world without the added greenhouse gases from industrial-era emissions.
European nations have seen a trend toward warmer and drier summers in recent decades, increasing the vulnerability of forests, shrublands and agricultural areas to large, fast-moving fires. In parts of the Iberian Peninsula, the seasonal pattern of heatwaves compounded by strong winds contributed to rapid fire spread this summer.
Spanish and Portuguese officials have said they will review firefighting resources, land management and early-warning systems in response to the season’s destruction. The WWA study’s attribution of the extreme weather to climate change adds to a growing body of research linking rising global temperatures to more frequent and severe heat-driven hazards.
The report does not attribute every ignition to climate change; rather, it estimates how much more likely and how much more intense the weather conditions that enabled the fires became as a result of human-driven warming. Investigations into specific causes of individual fires, including accidental or deliberate ignitions, remain the responsibility of local authorities and law enforcement.