By Kate Abnett<\/p>\n
BRUSSELS, July 31 (Reuters) – Human-caused climate change made the extreme weather fuelling wildfires in southwestern France twice as likely, and made the conditions \u200cdriving blazes in central Spain 20 times more likely, scientists said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Ongoing \u200cwildfires in Spain and France have forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and scorched huge swathes of \u200bland.<\/p>\n
The World Weather Attribution group of scientists used historical weather observations to assess how “fire-prone” hot, dry and windy conditions, which indicate how difficult it is to suppress a fire once it starts, have changed over time.<\/p>\n
Greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning coal, oil and gas, have \u200cincreased the planet’s average temperature to \u2060around 1.4 Celsius above pre-industrial times, according to the World Meteorological Organization.<\/p>\n
In today’s climate, extreme fires of this intensity are likely to occur \u2060once every 20 years in southwestern France, and once every six years in central Spain, the analysis said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable conditions that are extremely conducive \u200bto \u200bwildfires,” said Clair Barnes, a research associate in \u200bextreme weather at Imperial College London, \u200cwho co-authored the WWA analysis.<\/p>\n
“What’s unique about this case is that it’s still early in the season \u2014 and with another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary,” Barnes added.<\/p>\n
An increasingly important driver of Europe’s wildfire risk is the pattern of a wet winter \u2014 which supports vegetation growth \u2014 followed by a dry spring and summer, which dries out this vegetation, leaving \u200cforests stocked with large volumes of highly flammable fuel \u200bfor fires.<\/p>\n
Reducing wildfire risk therefore requires not only \u200ban emergency firefighting response, but more work \u200bto prevent fires “through risk-sensitive landscape planning and management,” the WWA analysis \u200csaid. That could include clearing forests of \u200bdried-out vegetation ahead of \u200bthe wildfire season.<\/p>\n
Spain had its wettest January for 25 years this year, followed by a summer that the country’s meteorological agency has said is the hottest on \u200brecord. France, too, is currently \u200csuffering its fourth heatwave of the year.<\/p>\n
Recent scientific studies have confirmed human-caused climate \u200bchange has made Europe’s hot and dry conditions in recent months more \u200blikely.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Kate Abnett; Editing by Aurora Ellis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Kate Abnett BRUSSELS, July 31 (Reuters) – Human-caused climate change made the extreme weather fuelling wildfires in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1512,13009,12321,4498,556,17,25407,16996,21526],"class_list":["post-63372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-climate-change","tag-conditions","tag-dry-conditions","tag-extreme-weather","tag-france","tag-spain","tag-weather-observations","tag-world-meteorological-organization","tag-world-weather-attribution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}