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 August 26, the total burned area in the four main European countries of the Mediterranean basin (Spain, France, Italy and Greece) was already almost twice the average of previous years. With the fire season not yet over, almost 330,000 hectares of forest have already gone up in smoke in the region, compared with an annual average of 190,000 hectares from 2006 to 2022.

Greece accounts for around half of the surface area burned by wildfires in Southern Europe to date: almost 160,000 hectares, or four times the annual average recorded in the country from 2006 to 2022. "This summer's the worst in history, since the beginning of meteorological data collection," the Greek Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection told a press conference at the end of August. While many of the country's regions and islands were badly damaged by fires in July (including Attica, Thessaly, Corfu, Rhodes), Greek firefighters are currently battling what has been described as the largest wildfire on record in the EU.

As the following infographic shows, although the fires in France are a relatively smaller scale to those of its Mediterranean neighbors, by August 23 fires in the country had already destroyed 22,000 hectares of woodland, a figure almost twice that of the national annual average over the last fifteen years. The areas most affected by wildfires are in the south of the country (such as in Corsica, the Mediterranean coast, Landes forest and Périgord).

Written by: Tristan Gaudiaut

Translated by: Anna Fleck