Reacción a "Forest fires and pest outbreaks could double in Europe before the end of this century"

The study offers one of the most robust approaches to date for anticipating how major forest disturbances in Europe (fires, bark beetles and wind) will change. Its main strength is methodological, as it combines a continental analysis with 100 m simulations and integrates vegetation feedback and the interaction between disturbance agents, which is highly innovative.

The results are compelling, showing how disturbances increase under all climate scenarios. The study predicts a particularly large impact in the Mediterranean region, which is key for Spain, projecting an increase in severely disturbed areas of between 52% and 89% by the end of the century, depending on the climate scenario. In this region, the dominant disturbance is fire, and the projected pattern is in line with previously demonstrated evidence, such as that warming increases the meteorological fire hazard, weakens the night-time barrier to fire, that fire seasons are becoming longer and that, as a consequence of the above, among other factors, the most extreme fire events appear to be increasing in recent times, as seen in 2025. Even so, the area of forest burned in Europe has not shown an upward trend in recent decades.

As in any large-scale study, the data and models are not ideal, but rather those available, which in this case are used to generate the best possible evidence about future dynamics. In this regard, the authors acknowledge some limitations, including assumptions in their simulations such as no changes in forest management. In addition, they focus only on high-severity disturbances. Added to this are other uncertainties related to the use of thresholds or the modelling process. Scrub is not explicitly addressed despite its role in fire, and species composition comes from remote sensing, maps and distribution models, not from field inventories, which would be more accurate.

All in all, the message is difficult to ignore: without mitigation, Europe, and especially the Mediterranean, is heading towards more disturbed areas and relative losses of mature forests, with increasing impacts as temperatures rise. The practical implication is twofold: it indicates that the cause (emissions) must be addressed and management must be reoriented towards forest resilience.