The Intensifying Threat of Wildfires in the Mediterranean: Quantifying the Role of Climate Change in Extreme Fire Weather Events from the Past, Present to the Future

Wildfires are an increasing environmental and societal threat across the Mediterranean region. While the widespread incidence of fires during recent summers has raised significant public concern, the impact of climate change on such events is challenging to quantify, and the evolving nature of extreme wildfires in general remains underexplored. Recent work has shed light on the link between extreme fire weather and climate change, particularly with respect to diagnosing uncertainties and sensitivities, but there are few studies directly linking individual wildfire events to the changing climate and its future implications.

This study employs an established statistical method applied to a large ensemble of climate model simulations as part of a seamless probabilistic approach to quantify how past, present and future risk in extreme fire weather has and will continue to change in the future. Using climate model projections to quantify the trends of likelihoods at different global warming levels offers great potential to support probabilistic assessment of future wildfire risks in a warmer world. Results reveal that fire weather conditions associated with the particularly damaging 2022 wildfires at ten independent locations across the Mediterranean regions of southern Europe and northern Africa have collectively become 80% more likely to occur compared to a century ago due to externally-forced warming temperatures. Further increases in likelihood of 60% and 80% are projected under +1.5°C and +2°C global warming levels, respectively, with the most pronounced increases observed in Spain and southern France. The findings emphasize the profound influence of climate change on the 2022-type wildfire events, manifesting the urgency of combining individual attribution studies further with future risk assessment to help enhance post-disaster resilience to the fire-prone regions.