Children born in Europe now will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents (an 84% increase), according to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
A child born in Europe in 2025 will live through more than three additional years of extreme fire weather compared with someone born in 1950, the researchers found.
The largest increases are projected in the Mediterranean—a region already hard hit by wildfires. There, people born in 2025 are projected to face up to 2.5 times the exposure to extreme fire weather than those born in 1950—the equivalent of over five additional years of extreme fire weather over their lifetime. That’s for a scenario where global warming increases by 2.6°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, as is currently predicted under current global climate and energy policies.
To map out potential outcomes, researchers used climate model projections for fire weather known as the Fire Weather Index. Fire weather refers to the hot, dry, and windy conditions that make fires more likely to ignite, spread faster, and become harder to suppress—conditions that are becoming more common due to climate change. They define extreme fire weather as days when the fire weather index exceeds the top 5% of days for that country over 1985-2014.
“It doesn't mean that there [will be] a wildfire on all of those days, but it does mean that the risk is much higher,” says Rosa Pietroiusti, lead author of the study and PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Portugal, the European country that has seen the highest proportion of its area burned in recent decades, can expect to see extreme fire weather days more than double under current climate policies, from 14 days per year from 1950 to 1970, to 32 days per year by 2100.
Each additional degree of global warming by the end of the century adds around 272 days of extreme fire weather to the life of a Portuguese child born in 2025. A child born in Greece can expect to see 473 additional days of exposure to extreme fire weather during their lifetime, while children in Spain and Italy will see 448 days.
Exposure to wildfire smoke comes with a number of immediate health impacts, including stinging eyes, wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. Over time, long-term exposure can cause and exacerbate diseases in the lungs, and heart, and has been shown to lead to cognitive impairment and memory loss. Long-term exposure to wildfire smoke is also associated with higher risk of death.
The study notes that rapid measures to reduce emissions could reduce exposure in all regions. If we limit warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, “a lot of exposure could be avoided,” says Pietroiusti. “While younger people will be more exposed than older generations under all pathways, every fraction of a degree of warming counts, and every fraction of a degree of avoided warming can reduce the hazard that we're exposing young people to during their lives.”
The world, however, has strayed far from that goal. A U.N. report published at the beginning of September found that the planet is set to pass the 1.5°C threshold for global warming set out in the Paris Agreement within the next few years. Optimistic scenarios estimate temperature rise peaking at 1.8°C, while other estimates predict even higher peaks.
Europe is the world’s fastest warming continent. Temperatures have risen by approximately 0.56°C per decade since the mid-1990s—more than double the global average.
This summer alone brought several severe heat waves to the continent, with the European Forest Fire Information System reporting that wildfires burned over 668,000 hectares (over 1.6 million acres) across the E.U., including Belgium’s worst wildfire in a century and the largest recorded wildfires in France and Spain since data collection began. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently proposed a new European Heatwave Plan as well as a future European firefighting fleet of airplanes to address the realities of climate change, calling this summer “the summer of truth.”
“We're really seeing that these conditions are not just climate model projections and simulations and results,” says Pietroiusti, “but they're really real world conditions and risks.”
