Major intensification of fire weather across southern Europe in recent decades

After decades of declining ignitions and burned area, recent fire seasons in Southern Europe (including the record-breaking 2025 season) have shown that wildfires are increasingly exceeding existing suppression capacity. The region appears to be entering an era of extreme fire risk, underscoring the urgent need to understand the drivers behind this escalation. Here, we use national wildfire statistics, reanalysis data, and large-scale climate indices to examine recent changes in fire risk across Southern Europe. We found that fire weather has severely intensified across the region. In vast parts of the Iberian Peninsula, France, Italy, and Greece, summer days featuring extreme fire-prone conditions have more than doubled between 1981 and 2025. This intensification is consistent with broader changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. We also found associations between fire-risk variability in Southern Europe and both the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), highlighting their potential relevance for seasonal fire-risk outlooks in the region. Our findings illuminate the growing climatic pressure on Southern European fire regimes and underscore the need for integrated adaptation strategies.