Climate change has primed the landscape to burn. But human migration has made Europe’s wildfires increasingly catastrophic.
Wildfires are becoming more difficult to manage, he says, because the land isn’t actively controlled with vegetation-thinning and deliberate burns. “The problem is that we as a society have onlyto a problem, building up firefighting capacity,” says Castellnou. “We haven’t built up ecosystem management.”
The demographic change and cityward migration is happening alongside climate change. A Mediterranean climate—both in the region around the Mediterranean Sea and in similar places like California—is already prone to wildfire. Rainy winters and springs encourage the growth of plants, which desiccate in the dry summer and turn into fuel. Climate change has made those conditions drier—and hotter—for longer. “It's a performance enhancer,” says Pyne.
“What’s really interesting, though,” Pyne adds, “is to see fire starting to move into Central Europe.” This is a more temperate region and historically hasn’t had the regimented wet-dry cycle of the Mediterranean.
As a result, Europe’s “fire regime,” as scientists call it, is transforming: The hotter it gets, the more the behavior of fire changes. As the dryness of vegetation increases, so does the amount of energy it releases when it burns. “So the power of the fire increases dramatically with the lack of water, and these fires will propagate faster,” says Guillermo Rein, who studies fire at Imperial College London. “Some of these fires are actually literally impossible to stop.
Fire scientists say the best way to mitigate the risk is by thinning excess vegetation and doing more
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