Record‐Breaking 2025 European Wildfires Concentrated in Northwest Iberia

作者：Guadalupe Sánchez‐Hernández, Marco Turco, Irene Repeto‐Deudero, Dominic Royé, Mara Baudena, Juan Pedro Montávez, Rosa Pietroiusti, Antonello Provenzale, Cristina Santín, Miguel Ángel Torres‐Vázquez, Juli G. Pausas · 发表于：Global Change Biology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/gcb.70649 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Fire effects on ecosystems、Landslides and related hazards、Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations

At the end of August 2025, the total burned area (BA) in Europe reached ~1 million hectares (Mha), the highest on record (https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/apps/effis.statistics/seasonaltrend). More than half of this total (~541,000 ha) was concentrated within only ~2% of the EU area, in a ~15 Mha region in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula (NW-IP; Figure 1a) and developed over just a few weeks in August (Keeping et al. 2025). For several days, large wildfires burned in the region, prompting military support and the first-ever activation of the European Civil Protection Mechanism in Spain. The fires caused severe environmental and socio-economic impacts, including at least eight fatalities and large-scale evacuations (https://www.euronews.com/2025/08/17/wildfires-in-spain-and-portugal-force-evacuations-and-deployment-of-thousands-of-emergency; Keeping et al. 2025). The fires occurred during an intense 16-day heatwave across southwestern Europe in August (https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-august-2025). As a consequence, the Fire Weather Index (FWI), a fire danger metric which combines temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitation, was particularly high in the NW-IP, with August 2025 showing the most extreme monthly fire-weather conditions in the 1985–2025 period (Figure 1b). According to the World Weather Attribution rapid assessment, human-caused climate change has made the kind of extreme fire-weather conditions observed in August 2025 ro...