Reacción a "Babies born in Spain will now experience twice as many extreme weather events linked to wildfires as their grandparents did"

It comes as no surprise that climate change is driving the weather conditions that favour wildfires. We scientists have been quantifying this for years and it is abundantly clear. For example, in the Mediterranean region, the period of extreme risk has lengthened by one month over four decades; nights offer less and less respite; and heatwaves that were once exceptionally rare are no longer so. In this regard, it has been well demonstrated that the extreme weather conditions associated with the 2025 wildfires on the Iberian Peninsula are now expected to occur approximately once every 13 years, compared with less than once every 2,500 years in a pre-industrial climate. The summer of 2026 has once again broken records, being the hottest summer on record in Spain, surpassing the record set in 2025.

What is novel about the work by Pietroiusti and colleagues is that it puts all this into a scale that is easy to understand: that of a human lifetime. Rather than speaking solely of degrees or meteorological indices, it tells us how many additional years younger generations will have to live with extreme fire conditions. The study estimates that, for a person born in 2025 in Spain, every additional degree by the end of the century would translate into around 448 more days of exposure to extreme fire conditions over the course of their life.

It is important to note that the study does not predict how many fires there will be, but rather how the weather conditions are changing, making it easier for fires to start and spread, and more difficult to control them. The actual risk also depends on other factors (such as the quantity, continuity and flammability of vegetation and other fuels in the area, sources of ignition, and the exposure of people and property). In this regard, these findings serve as yet another wake-up call to get to work on mitigating climate change and, at the same time, to take action on all those other risk factors over which we have greater capacity to act at a local level.