Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better.
The increase in hot, dry and windy weather that leads to small fires turning into raging infernos is to engulf more of Europe as carbon pollution pushes temperatures higher. In the worst-case scenario the researchers modelled, which would see global heating reach 3.6C above preindustrial levels, the burnt area would almost triple.
Improvements in fire management could moderate those increases by more than 70%, the study found, but not eradicate them entirely.
“Investments into fire management could help to a certain limit, but if we go on a path of high emissions … we still see strong increases in burnt area,” said Maik Billing, an ecosystem researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and lead author of the study. “Fire management cannot replace climate mitigation.”
The research comes as wildfires continue to ravage Europe, with large blazes hitting northern European countries such as the UK, Belgium and Germany after weeks in which France, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Greece battled monster infernos.
Across the EU, this fire season is set to become the third-worst on record, behind 2025 and 2022, according to data published by the European Forest Fire Information Service on Thursday. More than 600,000 hectares have burned so far, with records broken for this time of year in Belgium, France and Slovakia.
The researchers, who compared the projected annual burnt area in 2070-2100 with modelled results for the period 2000-2030, found the increase in fire weather was the biggest driver of change.
In the optimistic scenario, in which global heating is capped at 1.8C, a little above the current level of 1.4C, some regions showed moderate increases in fire weather while others experienced little change. In the pessimistic scenario, however, with 3.6C of heating by the end of the century, the researchers found consistent worsening of fire weather across “virtually all of Europe”. Scientists expect current policies to result in about 2.6C of global heating by the end of the century.
Using a second model, the researchers found that continued improvements in fighting fires could temper the effects of worsening fire weather, reducing burnt area by 92% in the cooler scenario compared with fixing firefighting efforts at today’s levels. The researchers used the Human Development Index as a proxy for firefighting ability, but acknowledged the rise of mega-fires made it hard to extrapolate from past experience.
Improvements in fire suppression since the 1980s have reduced the number of fires and the area burnt in southern Europe, a study found earlier this month, but the enthusiastic suppression of fires, even small ones, has paradoxically increased the residual fuel load. This has allowed fires to develop to extreme levels when conditions are favourable, resulting in fewer, but more ferocious, fires.
Such monster fires hit France and Spain in late July this year, forcing one-third of a million people from their homes as blazes raged with a force firefighters were unable to extinguish.
Víctor Resco de Dios, a forestry engineer at the University of Lleida, who was not involved in the study, said the fire season was often accompanied by an “unproductive blame game” – isolating only one of the two key factors whose interaction results in wildfires – and that the study was a reminder to move beyond scapegoating.
“The problem of wildfires wouldn’t be worsening if we were heading towards an ice age – instead of global warming,” he said. ”And it would have been largely mitigated if our landscapes were like they were a century ago, with a much smaller forest area.”
