How climate change is fueling wildfires in Spain, Portugal

How climate change is fueling wildfires in Spain, Portugal

Friday 3 Oct 2025

Intense wildfires that burned through large swathes of Spain and Portugal this summer — claiming at least eight lives and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate — were massively fuelled by climate change, according to a new report.

It states that climate change — driven primarily by the burning of oil, gas and coal — has made the weather conditions that fueled the wildfires 40 times more frequent and 30% more intense. The analysis came from the World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who study global warming's role in extreme weather.

The sheer size of the fires has "been astonishing", said Clair Barnes, one of the report's authors and researcher at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. "Hotter, drier and more flammable conditions are becoming more severe with climate change and are giving rise to fires of unprecedented intensity."

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Source: DW

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