Southern Europe has been getting fewer fires, and burning less land, than it did in the 1980s.

That is the finding buried inside a paper published this morning about fire weather getting worse. Across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece, the annual number of fires in the last decade ran at least 40 percent below the 1981 to 2010 average. Burned area fell with it: Spain down 25 percent, France down 41 percent, Italy down 31 percent [1].

Detection improved. Suppression improved. The fire problem measurably shrank.

What grew was the ceiling

The study, "Major intensification of fire weather across southern Europe in recent decades," appears in Scientific Reports under DOI 10.1038/s41598-026-61756-4. Sarah Feron is the lead author, with Raul R. Cordero and seven colleagues [1].

It tracks the Canadian Fire Weather Index across 1981 to 2025, using ERA5 reanalysis, national wildfire statistics for the five countries and EFFIS data [1]. Three numbers carry the argument:

  • Extreme fire-weather days more than doubled over the period.
  • Summer FWI on the Iberian Peninsula ran up to 50 percent higher in 2016 to 2025 than in the 1981 to 2010 baseline.
  • Extreme FWI days rose from fewer than 10 per summer to as many as 25.

In August 2025, FWI in northwestern Iberia ran up to 100 percent above the long-term average, alongside a Spanish national August temperature anomaly of plus 4.6 degrees C [1].

The paper's own sentence for what happens when a shrinking fire count meets a rising extreme is the one worth quoting: "Recent active fire seasons suggest that climate-driven extreme fire-weather conditions are starting to surpass suppression system capacity" [1].

This year is the test of that sentence

EFFIS, the European Commission's own fire information system, reported as of July 29: 434,976 hectares burned in the EU since January 1 [2].

At the same date in 2025, the worst year on record, the figure was 346,836. The 2006 to 2025 average is 172,186 [2].

This year is running at 2.53 times the twenty-year average, and 25 percent ahead of a record year at the same point. The fire count tells the same story: 1,407 detected against an average of 632, 2.2 times normal [2].

Two things the coverage got slightly wrong

Both are small, and both matter for what the paper can be used to say.

The scope is southern Europe, not Europe. The title says so and the analysis covers five countries. Reporting it as a Europe-wide finding stretches it past what was measured [1].

The strongest attribution line is not the paper's. Al Jazeera quoted co-author Raul Cordero saying the increase "can only be attributed to global warming" [4]. That is a scientist's remark to a reporter. The paper's own language is more careful, describing the intensification as "consistent with broader changes in temperature and precipitation patterns" and noting that "rising temperatures are intensifying fire weather in the region" [1].

The distinction is methodological rather than political. This is a trend-and-consistency analysis using ERA5 and the fire weather index, with NAO and ENSO considered. It is not a probabilistic event-attribution study, which is the design that licenses exclusive causal claims.

The finding survives the correction intact. What the paper establishes is narrower than the quote and harder to argue with: the weather that makes landscapes burn has intensified sharply across southern Europe, and the extreme end of it is now beginning to outrun the firefighters who spent forty years getting better at this.