A third of a million people have been forced to flee their homes due to wildfires caused by global heating in France and Spain, while many more have been forced to stay indoors.
French President Emmanuel Macron has mobilized the military to assist the response in south-west France, where the majority — around 200,000 people — have been evacuated, while Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for a multi-national response to the climate emergency.
More land has burned this year than last across Europe, so far, and last year was the worst ever, with more than 2.5 million acres burned. Three of the 15 largest European fires in the last decade have burned this month, one in France, near Bordeaux, and two in Spain, near Madrid.
“Human-induced climate change made the extreme fire weather that fueled the recent destructive wildfires at least twice as likely in France and at least 20 times more likely in Spain, according to our new study,” the organization World Weather Attribution said on Bluesky on July 31. “In today’s climate, events of this intensity are expected to occur once every 20 years in southwestern France and once every six years in central Spain.”
According to the report, “highly evaporative conditions as observed in April-June 2026 [in Western Europe] have become about 80 times more likely.”
A separate study — just published, but written earlier — found Southern Europe’s weather reached extreme fire-prone levels more than twice as many days compared to decades ago. Better fire suppression and management techniques had significantly decreased the number of fires and amount of land burned in Southern Europe from the 1980s to 2018, but since then have quickly gotten worse as climate change has overwhelmed those improvements.
“These aren’t fires burning in remote areas, they are happening in close proximity to where people live,” WWA researcher Clair Barnes said. “Every fraction of a degree of warming pushes us into unknown territory, and these fires show exactly what that risk looks like.”
In France, 60,000 people evacuated from three Bordeau suburbs, and fans were banned from the final stage of the Tour de France, while in Spain wildfires threatened the capital, Madrid.
“Climate change is driving drought in Europe — but not how you might expect,” WWA said. “While there isn’t a clear signal for climate change impacting the dry weather, extreme heat is sucking more moisture out of the landscape.”
“We should work on a state agreement against the climate emergency,” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said. “Because science is telling us the temperatures are going to get more intense, are going to get worse, and are going to have a greater impact on our lives.”