“A concentration of heatwaves increased the atmosphere’s thirst and cured these [grass and herbs] and other fuels,” said Victor Resco de Dios, a forestry engineer at the University of Lleida. “This has been accompanied by very unstable atmospheric conditions, leading to the occurrence of fire storms.”
The flames are known to have killed more than a dozen people but scientists say the hidden death toll is likely to be far greater. Thick clouds of smoke will have fouled people’s lungs with harmful gases and toxic particles small enough to seep into the bloodstream. A study published in the Lancet in December blamed wildfire smoke for 111,000 deaths a year in Europe, including Russia, between 2000 and 2019.
On Tuesday, the EU’s Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service found that “unprecedented” fire activity this year had driven Spain’s wildfire emissions up to the highest annual total in the 23 years since records began. Fumes from fires across the Iberian peninsula were made worse by smoke drifting across the Atlantic from Canada, which has also burned badly in recent weeks.
Wildfire emissions from Spain and Portugal in August have been “exceptional”, said Mark Parrington, a scientist with Copernicus. “The large quantities of smoke – and especially PM2.5 – released into the atmosphere have resulted in severely degraded air quality locally, and further afield across the Iberian peninsula and parts of France.”
Effis said on Tuesday that fire weather conditions were expected to ease across most of southern Europe this week, but added that “very high to very extreme” anomalies were expected in north-west Europe.
Santín Nuño said a “catastrophic” wildfire season was unlikely every year, but that each year the probability of breaking records was increasing.
It is “highly probable” the record in 2025 will be broken again in a few years, she added. “This is a new reality. And the sooner we realise it, and take action to be more resilient to these types of wildfires, the better.”
