Wildfires have scorched over one million hectares across Europe this year, marking 2025 as the most devastating summer on record. Deadly blazes have consumed four times as much land this year compared to the average for the same period over the past two decades, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). EFFIS revealed that 1,015,024 hectares have been burnt this year, surpassing the previous record of 988,544 hectares set in 2017.
The fires have released 37 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – roughly equivalent to the annual CO2 output of Portugal or Sweden. They have also shattered records for this period of the year across nine additional air pollutants, including fine particles termed PM2.5 that researchers say make wildfires considerably more lethal than previously understood.
Cristina Santín Nuño, a fire scientist at the Spanish National Research Council, explained that the “perfect conditions” for large wildfires were occurring increasingly frequently due to climate change and changes in land usage.
Wildfires tore across vast areas of southern Europe this month as temperatures went beyond 40C throughout much of the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
This dried out vegetation, which in countries such as Spain and Portugal had flourished following a damp spring, allowing fires to burn more intensely and spread further.
The flames are confirmed to have claimed more than a dozen lives but scientists warn the actual death toll is likely to be higher.
Dense clouds of smoke will have contaminated people’s lungs with dangerous gases and poisonous particles tiny enough to penetrate the bloodstream.
On Tuesday, the Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service discovered that “unprecedented” fire activity this year had taken Spain’s wildfire emissions to the highest annual total in the 23 years since records began.
Toxic fumes from blazes across the Iberian peninsula were worsened by smoke drifting across the Atlantic from Canada, which has also suffered severe burning in recent weeks.
Wildfire emissions from Spain and Portugal in August have been “exceptional”, said Mark Parrington, a scientist with Copernicus.
EFFIS said on Tuesday that fire weather conditions were expected to ease across most of southern Europe this week, but added that “very high to very extreme” anomalies were expected in north-west Europe.
