Europe is on fire. This summer the European Union has seen more than 1,750 wildfires. The flames have forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate across France and Spain. Belgium is currently battling its worst wildfire in a century. And in some parts of Greece, fires have forced tourism to come to a screeching halt. Some 1.5 million acres have burned so far—and the season isn’t even over yet. Worse still, this is just a taste of what’s to come.
In a new paper published in the journal Global Change Biology, scientists found that the area of Europe that is affected by fires will essentially triple within a lifetime, or by 2100, under a high-emissions scenario. The reason is simple: climate change is heating the continent up, drying the land and turning vegetation into tinder.
“The fires in France, Spain and Greece show how quickly hot, dry and windy weather conditions can stretch firefighters and their resources,” said Kirsten Thonicke, co-senior author of the study and a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, in a statement. “With climate change, conditions could become so extreme that we really hit limits to what we can do to prevent and fight fires once they get to a certain size.”
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The researchers compared two possible scenarios: A future in which the world reduces greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades and a future where nothing changes. In the first scenario, in which global temperatures were predicted to rise by 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the area burned by wildfires in Europe every year would increase by 39 percent, the researchers found. In the worse scenario, which had a global temperature rise of about 3.6 degrees C (6.5 degrees F), Europe would see a 192 percent jump.
The study is a warning for the world—many places affected by wildfire are at high risk of those fires becoming bigger, harder to control and more frequent as a result of climate change.
“The findings in this study are consistent with general trends we anticipate in the U.S., including increasingly severe fire conditions caused by climate change,” says Erica Smithwick, a landscape and ecosystem ecologist at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the new study.
Research by Smithwick and her colleagues back in 2011 predicted “substantial” increases in fires near Yellowstone National Park by the middle of the century. The relationship between climate change and extreme wildfires have been “repeatedly shown in other studies since,” she says.
Firefighting and fire prevention can only do so much, she adds.
“Fuels management can mitigate some of the worst effects near homes and critical resources. And proactive fire management is crucial for restoring fire-adapted systems and supporting a range of social and ecological objectives,” Smithwick says. “But it will not fully solve the looming fire-weather dangers caused by climate change.”