Europe’s quiet fire decade masks a looming threat
For years, something strange was happening in southern Europe. The weather conditions that make wildfires likely were getting worse. Hotter summers. Drier vegetation. Longer stretches without rain. And yet, the actual area burned was shrinking. Fire numbers were dropping. It looked like a paradox — or perhaps proof that the threat was overblown.
Now researchers have untangled that puzzle, and the answer reframes how Europe should read its own fire history. A team led by Raúl Cordero, a meteorologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, compiled records stretching back to the 1980s. [2] They looked at burned land and fire counts across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. The data revealed a striking gap between what the weather promised and what actually burned.
Between 2016 and 2025, wildfire activity across the region was substantially lower than in the 1981 to 2010 period. There were fewer fires. Less area burned. In each country, the number of fires declined by at least 40 percent. Portugal was the exception, with its massive 2017 blazes, but even that country’s overall trend followed the same direction.
The decline is remarkable precisely because fire weather — the hot, dry, windy conditions that make vegetation easier to ignite — has moved in the opposite direction. “Europe used to be kind of an anomaly,” says Cordero. [2] The region was experiencing higher temperatures than before and a higher fire risk, “but the burned area was going down.” For years, that apparent contradiction allowed complacency to take root.
A Hidden Shift in Fire Weather
The analysis, published in Scientific Reports, shows just how dramatically fire-promoting conditions have intensified In parts of France and Spain, the intensity of hot, dry, fire-favoring weather over the past decade was up to 50 percent higher than during the 1981 to 2010 baseline period. That is not a subtle change. It is a step change in the physical environment that governs how vegetation burns.
Some areas of Spain and Portugal that once experienced fewer than ten days of highly fire-promoting conditions per year now see up to 25 such days annually. That is more than double the historical exposure. The window in which a spark can become a catastrophe has widened considerably, even if the fires themselves had not yet caught up.
Cristina Santín, who studies wildfires at the University of Oviedo in Mieres, Spain, says scientists have long warned about this trajectory. [3] “We have been telling society this is going to happen, that we are going to have larger, more catastrophic, more dangerous fires,” she says. [3] “And now they are here.” The warning was not speculation. It was a forecast based on the same kind of data Cordero’s team has now laid out.
The quiet decade was not a reprieve. It was a lag. Fire weather had already changed, but the landscape had not yet responded to that change.
Records Falling Across the Continent
In 2026, the lag caught up with Europe. Satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System show that 91,000 hectares had burned in France as of 29 July. [4] That figure already smashes the previous record of just over 66,000 hectares for an entire fire season, which typically runs from March through October. The season is nowhere near over.
Spain has fared worse in absolute terms. More than 200,000 hectares have burned there, well above the average for this point in the season. A fire near Madrid has become the largest single fire in the country’s history. The blaze came close to destroying a NASA complex used to communicate with deep-space spacecraft. [5]
In France, firefighters confronted something they had never seen before: a towering “fire cloud” intense enough to generate its own erratic weather. It was the first such phenomenon ever observed in the nation. Fire clouds, also known as pyrocumulonimbus, form when intense heat from a blaze forces air upward so violently that it creates thunderstorms. Those storms can produce lightning, which starts new fires, and erratic winds that push the original fire in unpredictable directions.
The human toll has been immense. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. On 29 July, ministers from Spain and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement declaring that “this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.” That is not language typically used for weather events. It is language reserved for existential threats.
Another heatwave is now developing across the region. The fires that have already broken records may face conditions that push them further. Scientists say these blazes could mark a shift in southern Europe’s fire patterns — after decades of relative quiet, the region’s fire regime is starting to resemble that of notoriously combustible places such as California.
The Team Reading What Comes Next
Cordero’s group at the University of Groningen is among those now examining whether this season represents a genuine turning point or an extreme outlier. Their dataset, built from records going back to the 1980s, provides the long-term context needed to distinguish a trend from a spike.
The question is whether the relationship between fire weather and burned area has fundamentally changed. For years, rising risk did not translate into rising damage. The new data suggests that relationship may have inverted. The weather conditions are no longer just a warning signal. They are producing the catastrophic outcomes that the earlier data only implied.
The researchers will continue tracking burned area and fire counts across the five countries as the season progresses. Their records will show whether the current fires are a one-season anomaly or the beginning of a new pattern.
Sources
1. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-02361-3
4. European Forest Fire Information System
5. NASA