Attribution of the record breaking 2025 European fire season to climate change
10 affiliations
- 1Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, London, UK
- 2Levehulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, Imperial College London, London, UK
- 3Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment, Paris Saclay University, Paris, France
- 4School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece
- 5Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
- 6Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Türkiye
- 7Institute of Geosciences, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Tirana, Albania
- 8Department of Compound Environmental Risks, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
- 9Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 10Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
Abstract
The 2025 European fire season was historically extreme, with record-breaking burned area exceeding 1,400,000 ha, and multiple regionally unprecedented wildfires. Emerging fire regimes and extreme wildfire behaviour in Europe pose increasing adaptation challenges. Extreme event attribution of a recent fire season, combined with analysis of changes in vegetation and land use, provides insight into the effect of climate and environmental change on high impact events. We analyse five regions that experienced particularly extreme wildfire activity in 2025 (northwestern Iberia, northern and western Britain, Occitania, the eastern Adriatic/Ionian, and northern and western Türkiye) capturing a diverse range of driving weather conditions and fire regimes. Strong trends towards drier summer summers and extreme weekly vapour pressure deficit (VPD) were found, with summer drought emergent from natural variability in most southern European regions, and VPD extreme emergent in reanalysis data for all regions. Changes in VPD are the main reason why combined hot, dry, and windy conditions have become more frequent than expected from natural variability. This emergence is seen in both reanalysis data and climate models for the Iberian, Adriatic/Ionian and Turkish regions. In contrast, in the British and Occitanian regions, models do not show observed trends.
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BibTeX
@article{keeping2026attribution,
title = {{Attribution of the record breaking 2025 European fire season to climate change}},
author = {Theodore Keeping and Mariam Zachariah and Olivia Haas and Manolis G. Grillakis and Clair R. Barnes and Gareth D. Clay and Bikem Ekberzade and O. Jaupaj and Andreia F. S. Ribeiro and Ricardo Machado Trigo and Apostolos Voulgarakis and Friederike E. L. Otto},
journal = {Natural hazards and earth system sciences},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.5194/nhess-26-3761-2026},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-3761-2026},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Attribution of the record breaking 2025 European fire season to climate change
AU - Theodore Keeping
AU - Mariam Zachariah
AU - Olivia Haas
AU - Manolis G. Grillakis
AU - Clair R. Barnes
AU - Gareth D. Clay
AU - Bikem Ekberzade
AU - O. Jaupaj
AU - Andreia F. S. Ribeiro
AU - Ricardo Machado Trigo
AU - Apostolos Voulgarakis
AU - Friederike E. L. Otto
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/13
JO - Natural hazards and earth system sciences
DO - 10.5194/nhess-26-3761-2026
UR - https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-3761-2026
AB - The 2025 European fire season was historically extreme, with record-breaking burned area exceeding 1,400,000 ha, and multiple regionally unprecedented wildfires. Emerging fire regimes and extreme wildfire behaviour in Europe pose increasing adaptation challenges. Extreme event attribution of a recent fire season, combined with analysis of changes in vegetation and land use, provides insight into the effect of climate and environmental change on high impact events. We analyse five regions that experienced particularly extreme wildfire activity in 2025 (northwestern Iberia, northern and western Britain, Occitania, the eastern Adriatic/Ionian, and northern and western Türkiye) capturing a diverse range of driving weather conditions and fire regimes. Strong trends towards drier summer summers and extreme weekly vapour pressure deficit (VPD) were found, with summer drought emergent from natural variability in most southern European regions, and VPD extreme emergent in reanalysis data for all regions. Changes in VPD are the main reason why combined hot, dry, and windy conditions have become more frequent than expected from natural variability. This emergence is seen in both reanalysis data and climate models for the Iberian, Adriatic/Ionian and Turkish regions. In contrast, in the British and Occitanian regions, models do not show observed trends.
SN - 1561-8633
SN - 1684-9981
ER -