Europe's Children Face Years More of Extreme Fire Weather Than Their Grandparents Did

Europeans born in 2025 are projected to spend 3.2 more years of their lives under extreme fire weather than those born in 1950, an increase of 84%, if the world stays on its current climate policies. The figure comes from an open-access study published Sept. 21 in Environmental Research Letters.

The study counts weather, not fire. An extreme fire weather day is one on which heat, dryness and wind push local fire danger into the top 5% of what that place normally sees, conditions that make fires easier to start and harder to put out. It is not a count of fires or burned area. Rising fire danger across Europe is already well established, but its implications for the generations now being born remained unclear.

Rosa Pietroiusti of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and colleagues tracked the Canadian Fire Weather Index, a standard danger rating, across an ensemble of global climate models. They then combined it with United Nations population and life-expectancy data along warming pathways for the rest of the century. The current-policies case is 2.6 °C of warming by 2100, the median the latest UN Emissions Gap Report expects. The team attributes 86% of the gap between the two generations to climate-driven fire weather rather than longer lives.

Holding warming to the Paris Agreement's 1.5 °C target instead would cut that cohort's lifetime exposure by 1.3 years on average across Europe. The authors describe the overall pattern as a pronounced inequality between generations.

The paper examines Portugal separately, Europe's most fire-affected country. There, under current policies, people born in 2025 are projected to face nearly twice the lifetime exposure of those born in 1950. Each additional degree of end-of-century warming adds about 270 days of extreme fire weather to the life of a person born in Portugal in 2025, the researchers estimate.

The team released the code as dem4cli, an open-source Python package that joins population data to any climate hazard.