Wildfires Ravage Southern Europe

Southern Europe’s wildfire season used to typically run from July to September, but now data shows that it is getting longer and more intense. Climate change is leading to longer and more extreme heat waves, which dry out vegetation, enabling fires to spread quickly.

According to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) database, as of July 22, the total burned area in the four main European Union countries of the Mediterranean basin (Spain, France, Italy and Greece) was already 70 percent higher than in previous years. With the fire season not yet over, almost 370,000 hectares of wildland have already gone up in smoke in the region, compared with an annual average of under 220,000 hectares from 2006 to 2025.

The development was this year driven by fires in Spain and France, where mass evacuations have been carried out and thousands of firefighters were deployed in the past weeks. While in Spain, the area burned by wildfires was already twice as big as of July 22 than previous year's averages, France saw an increase in burned area of more than 500 percent this year.

Usually, Italy is the EU country seeing the largest wildfires after Spain, but this year, France will likely land in rank 2. Greece, seeing on average as much burned area as Italy, has seen remarkably little fire activity this year so far.