Are the European Wildfires a Sign of a Climate Tipping Point?

The question people are asking is: Why is this happening in Europe now? Is it climate change? Are there too many trees in the forest? The answer is that it is both. It is the same kind of combination of factors we see in California and Australia.

We are seeing catastrophic wildfires more and more often, all around the world. Of course, we have had a lot of tragic experiences with wildfire in the western U.S. and in California since 2017. But we have also been seeing more damaging wildfires in Australia, in Greece and now in Western Europe.

This is a truly global problem and it reflects a combination of things. Global climate change is at the heart of it. All around the world, the climate is shifting in a way that favors bigger fires: hotter, drier and windier conditions. Hotter weather and lower moisture dry out vegetation. Changes in wind patterns can make fires spread more rapidly when they start. There are a lot of really problematic changes in the climate system that fuel these fires and that is one really important driver.

In many places, this also reflects things other than climate change, including a buildup of fuel in forests, which is why, once a fire ignites, it can become so intense. That buildup comes, among other things, from a lot of effort to prevent fires over the past half century. We have tried really hard to extinguish fires before they get big, and that can be protective in the short run. But down the road, it can also lead to accumulations of vegetation — including brush, dead wood and smaller trees — that eventually burn very hot and become very hard to put out.

So we are seeing this accumulation of fuel because of a history of aggressive fire suppression, and that is catching up to us now at exactly the wrong time, as the climate also turns against us. You have these two factors running into each other: more fuel that has built up and is ready to burn, and weather conditions that favor the kinds of fires that are very hard to put out.

We have also tended, around the world, to build more and more homes and other valuable assets right in the path of these natural hazards. If you think about the places where wildfires are most dangerous, they are often very nice places to live. There also tends to be developable land. Certainly in the United States, there has been a lot of construction of communities in the path of wildfires over the past 50 or 60 years.

When you put those things together — climate change, fuel buildup and more development in fire-prone areas — it is a really hard combination of factors to deal with.

What is striking about Europe is that this shows how broad the exposure to wildfire risk has become. I saw a New York Times story about wildfires in Scotland and one of the points was that England and the U.K. are now getting the kind of weather that Spain used to get 20 years ago because of climate change. That is the broader story: wildfire risk is no longer confined to the places people are used to seeing it. It is becoming a global climate risk.

What do these fires reveal about preparedness?

One of the things we are seeing is that wildfire risk is both intensifying in places where it already existed and expanding geographically. Places that were historically more marginal — where maybe they had occasional wildfires, but they were not catastrophic — are now having weather conditions that are more conducive to these really bad events. The footprint is getting bigger.

That matters because some of these places have not adapted socially in the same way.

A report— commissioned by Portugal-based Avincis , which leases firefighting planes and helicopters — said Europe is dangerously unprepared to tackle a growing wildfire ​crisis and must overhaul its fleets of firefighting aircraft and step up investment.

That is where the social sciences have a really important role to play. Climate scientists can tell us a lot about where the winds are coming from, what they are carrying, how drought cycles are changing and what is happening in the climate system. But there is also a human and institutional side to this: How do governments mobilize resources? How do they procure equipment? How do they decide where to invest in mitigation? That connects directly to my own research on wildfire insurance and self-protection, which looks at how households respond to wildfire risk and whether insurance and policy can encourage people to invest in measures that reduce damage before a fire occurs. How do people understand risk and change behavior around their homes and communities?

Those are social science questions. As wildfire risk becomes a global problem, it is not only about understanding the fire weather. It is also about how societies recognize a new climate reality and adapt quickly enough to keep people safe.

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