Southern Europe 'becoming more flammable' in hotter climate, experts say
Scientists said fire-prone summer days have nearly tripled in parts of southern Europe, even as better firefighting has reduced the number of blazes.
- A new study published Thursday in Scientific Reports found Southern Europe is "becoming more flammable," with summer days primed for extreme fire conditions more than doubling to around 25 days since 1981.
- Scientists described this "major intensification" as driven by climate change, though total fire numbers have declined since the 1980s, remaining infernos are significantly larger and more extreme.
- While cooling weather helped calm massive blazes in France and Spain on Thursday, firefighters battled at least 115 fires in Turkiye, and two firefighters died on Crete on Wednesday.
- Uncontained blazes scorched more than 120,000 hectares across France and Spain, forcing more than 300,000 people to abandon homes—a situation atmospheric scientist Raul Cordero called "the ingredients for a disaster" now "unfolding."
- Experts suggest "sustainable land use management" and prescribed burns can reduce fire severity by 16 per cent, though researchers warn that without stopping global warming, the situation will continue worsening.
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24 Articles
Decades of successful firefighting efforts have left a large amount of flammable material on the landscape of southern Europe, fueling the current wildfires. Under the pressure of extreme weather conditions, the Mediterranean fires are increasingly resembling the infamously devastating California wildfires, scientists say.
Warm, dry, low humidity, and windy: these are conditions favorable for wildfires, or 'fire weather'. Since the early 1980s, the number of days with such weather has increased significantly in Southern Europe, scientists write in the journal Scientific Reports. "The number of days with an extremely high fire risk has nearly doubled in 40 years," says Raúl Cordero Carrasco, a climate researcher at the University of Groningen. "That is due to glob…
DEXYPTAGE - The overall rise in temperatures is not the cause of fire departures, but new studies show how it makes southern Europe "more flammable" to the point of gradually exceeding firefighting capabilities.
A study shows how the number of days in which temperatures, drought and wind lead to catastrophic events in southern Europe has multiplied since the 1980s
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