Climate Change Made ‘Fire Weather’ in France, Spain More Likely

Climate change made the weather that fueled Europe’s recent wildfires at least twice as likely in France and at least 20 times as likely in Spain, scientists at the World Weather Attribution group said on Friday.

The global climate is around 1.4C warmer than in the pre-industrial era, amplifying the chances of the very dry, hot, windy conditions that caused the fires to spread out of control, the authors said.

In today’s climate, the weather underlying such intense wildfires can be expected to occur every 20 years in southwestern France and every six years in central Spain, the study found, based on a comparison of historical summer conditions to this year’s. That’s more frequent than would be expected in a world without human-caused warming, the authors said.

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“Climate change means that the right combination of weather conditions that create a tinderbox and turn it into a disaster happens much more often,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study.

The severity of the fires was also exacerbated by a wet winter, the study found, meaning that shrubs and other vegetation grew considerably and then dried out during heat waves in June and July. That provided lots of fuel for the fires, which have proved very difficult to contain.

Blazes have consumed hundreds of square miles close to the cities of Bordeaux in France and Madrid, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate. New fires have broken out in England and Greece.

Imma Oliveras Menor, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford, said in an emailed statement that the study did not take into account land management practices that might have contributed to the spread or direct cause of the fires. But “it shows that climate change is here and part of the cocktail that is causing these extreme wildfires,” she said.

Photograph: A firefighter inspects a fire which has flared up again in the forest during wildfires at Lège-Cap Ferret, France, on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Wildfires that began near Saumos on July 22 have burned about 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) and forced the evacuation of some 220,000 people from 23 communes in the Gironde.

Copyright 2026 Bloomberg.

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