On Friday 31 July, civil protection ordered the evacuation of a suburb west of Athens. This is the latest in a long list of population evacuations caused by the devastating fires sweeping across Europe - with France and Spain leading in terms of the scale of the area burned. The European Union Civil Protection Mechanism was called in to reinforce national arrangements (see EUROPE 13917/1).
“Human-induced climate change made the extreme weather conditions conducive to fires, which fuelled the recent destructive wildfires, at least twice as likely in France and at least 20 times more likely in Spain,” the international scientific partnership World Weather Attribution (WWA) said on Friday in an analysis.
These fires, which have destroyed 140,000 hectares in Spain in July and 115,000 hectares in France since the beginning of the year, have been described as among the worst ever recorded in those countries, the scientists say.
Several recent WWA analyses show “that the June heatwaves and the drought currently affecting Europe were fuelled by human-induced climate change”, a trend that confirms observations following the Spanish and Portuguese fires last year.
The scientists estimate that, given current climate conditions, events of this intensity can be expected once every 20 years in south-west France and once every six years in central Spain. According to them, these are cautious estimates.
They explain that wet winters followed by dry springs are risk factors for fires in these regions, because vegetation grows before drying out and becoming fuel for fires.
Beyond the direct risks to public safety, material damage and the environmental impact on burned areas, Augustin Colette, head of unit at Ineris, warns about the quantity of air pollutants released into the atmosphere, reaching levels 20 times higher than the good air quality standard, within a radius of 400 km around the fire zones.
Read WWA’s latest analysis: https://aeur.eu/f/n39 (Original version in French by Nadège Delépine)