Record-Breaking Wildfires Scorch Europe in 2025

Summary

The European Union is fac­ing its worst wild­fire sea­son on record, with over a mil­lion hectares of land burned so far this year accord­ing to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The wild­fires, exac­er­bated by extreme weather con­di­tions, have led to record-break­ing lev­els of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions and other air pol­lu­tants across the EU, caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant envi­ron­men­tal and health con­cerns.

This year, the European Union is expe­ri­enc­ing its worst wild­fire sea­son since offi­cial records of the bloc’s fire-hit land began in 2006.

According to data released by EFFIS, the branch of the E.U.’s Copernicus Climate Change Service respon­si­ble for eval­u­at­ing fire dan­ger and map­ping burned areas, which was ana­lyzed by Reuters, more than a mil­lion hectares of European land have burned so far this year.

A sep­a­rate analy­sis of the EFFIS data by the European Commission indi­cates that the total burnt area in the European Union as of September 9^th is 994,363 hectares.

The pre­vi­ous most exten­sive destruc­tion from wild­fires in the E.U. coun­tries was recorded in 2017, when nearly 990,000 hectares of land were charred by flames.

More than two-thirds of the fire-affected land this year is located on the Iberian Peninsula, which is respon­si­ble for approx­i­mately 44 per­cent of global olive oil pro­duc­tion in the 2024/25 crop year—a com­bined area of around 685,000 hectares of forests and agri­cul­tural land burned in Spain and Portugal.

In Spain alone, around 400,000 hectares have burned since the start of the year, which is more than five times the country’s aver­age for this time period between 2006 and 2024.

The heat­wave that gripped Spain for more than two weeks in August cre­ated tin­der­box con­di­tions in the coun­try, mak­ing wild­fires more likely to erupt.

According to Aemet, the Spanish mete­o­ro­log­i­cal agency, the heat­wave was the most intense on record, with tem­per­a­tures reach­ing up to 43 ºC for sev­eral days in some parts of the coun­try.

The inten­sity of the heat­wave also caused a tem­per­a­ture anom­aly – the dif­fer­ence between the observed tem­per­a­ture and the long-term aver­age tem­per­a­ture – 4.6 ºC higher than the expected tem­per­a­ture thresh­old in heat­wave con­di­tions.

“The sheer size of these fires has been aston­ish­ing,” said Clair Barnes, a researcher at Imperial College London’s envi­ron­men­tal pol­icy cen­ter. ​“Hotter, drier and more flam­ma­ble con­di­tions are becom­ing more severe with cli­mate change and are giv­ing rise to fires of unprece­dented inten­sity.”

Along with other sci­en­tists, Barnes pub­lished a report that links the out­break of wild­fires in Portugal and Spain this sum­mer to cli­mate change.

In their report, the researchers asserted that today’s cli­mate, which is 1.3 ºC warmer than pre-indus­trial lev­els, increases the like­li­hood of extreme weather occur­ring in the Iberian coun­tries by a fac­tor of 40.

A rel­a­tively new extreme weather phe­nom­e­non known as a flash drought made its pres­ence felt on the Spanish wild­fires. 

These intense, rapidly devel­op­ing peri­ods of dry weather are dri­ven by a phys­i­cal process known as evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion. 

In evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion, the com­bi­na­tion of extreme heat and the lack of rain­fall leads to intense evap­o­ra­tion in the atmos­phere, dry­ing out the veg­e­ta­tion and plants and cre­at­ing highly flam­ma­ble mat­ter.

Flash droughts can occur in a mat­ter of days, typ­i­cally between five and 30, instead of the months or even years required for typ­i­cal droughts to take effect. They can have detri­men­tal effects on plants and cul­ti­vated land due to their rapid growth.

In August, Spain’s north­west­ern region, notably Galicia and Castilla y León, expe­ri­enced a flash drought that exac­er­bated the dry weather con­di­tions and fuelled the out­break of megafires.

Among other E.U. coun­tries, Romania has also suf­fered exten­sive dam­age from wild­fires this sum­mer, with 128,000 hectares burned so far, a five­fold increase of the country’s aver­age in the last two decades.

Germany, Slovakia and Cyprus, respon­si­ble for about 4,000 to 6,000 met­ric tons of E.U. olive oil pro­duc­tion each year, have already expe­ri­enced their worst fire sea­sons in 20 years of exist­ing data.

Apart from destroy­ing trees and wildlife, wild­fires also sig­nif­i­cantly increase atmos­pheric pol­lu­tion. 

In Spain, the amount of car­bon diox­ide emit­ted from fires this year has exceeded 17 mil­lion tons, sur­pass­ing any CO2 emis­sions in the coun­try in a sin­gle year since 2003.

Across the E.U., wild­fires have released more than 39 mil­lion tons of CO2 into the atmos­phere so far this year. Scientists have warned that records for other air pol­lu­tants, such as PM10 and PM2.5 par­tic­u­late mat­ter, which are asso­ci­ated with can­cer expo­sure, have also been bro­ken in the E.U. due to the fires.

• Reuters
• The Guardian