Assessing the influence of climate on wildfire impacts across Mediterranean Europe

Wildfires occurring under warmer and drier conditions are likely to be destructive to infrastructure causing economic losses and affecting population. While climate, represented through fire weather, has been shown to be the dominant driver of wildfires there is still a lack of analyses exploring to what extent climate influences wildfire impacts. Here we examine the statistical relationship between fire weather conditions and wildfire impacts at an interannual scale across Mediterranean Europe. To do so, we combined Fire Weather Index (FWI) with burned area from the European Forest Fire Information System, as well as wildfire economic losses and affected population extracted from the EM-DAT disaster database over the period 2000–2023. Overall, most of the wildfire impacts were dominated by a few iconic events that have occurred during extreme fire seasons. Nearly 90% of the affected population and economic losses occurred when the FWI aggregated over the fire season exceeded 23 and 30 respectively. Additionally, the analysis highlighted the FWI as the main driver of burned area, showing strong positive correlations in all analyzed countries. FWI also showed moderate positive correlations with wildfire economic losses and population affected, yet these relationships varied by country. Countries more severely impacted by wildfires, such as Portugal, Spain, and Greece, exhibited stronger correlations than those less affected. These results emphasized the importance of climate variability in enabling wildfire activity and influencing impacts across Mediterranean countries.