During the summer of 2025, Europe experienced its worst year of the past two decades for wildfires in terms of area burned, and total emissions of carbon and other smoke pollutants. According to estimated biomass burning emissions from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), implemented by ECMWF for the EU, intense fires in the Iberian Peninsula in mid-August resulted in Europe's highest annual total emissions since the start of systematic monitoring in 2003.
Fire locations and conditions
Fire conditions across Europe during summer 2025 were shaped by a combination of persistent meteorological anomalies and vegetation moisture. In the eastern Mediterranean and southeast Europe (Greece, Türkiye, Cyprus and Syria), below-average rainfall and early heatwaves rapidly dried landscapes and created conditions for an early fire season, with high fire probability indicated by the ECMWF 'SPARKY' Probability of Fire (PoF) model from June onwards. The estimated emissions around the region resulted in some of the highest annual totals in the CAMS dataset, which covers 2003 to present. In contrast, southwestern Europe (and the Iberian Peninsula in particular) experienced a wet winter and spring that promoted extensive vegetation growth. Although the relatively high vegetation water content initially reduced the fire potential, the prolonged heatwaves and rainfall deficits through June and July gradually dried this surplus of fuel.
By early August, extreme heat, very low humidity and periods of strong winds created favourable conditions for large and intense fires, particularly in southern France, northern Portugal and Spain. During this period, France experienced its largest recorded fire, with a burned area of about 170 km² in the southwestern Aude department. Despite the significant nature of some of these individual fires, the total estimated emissions for Europe as a whole remained below average.
The picture changed in mid-August, however, as the sequence of spring fuel build-up in Iberia, combined with persistent high PoF and extreme heatwave conditions across southwestern Europe, provided the ideal conditions for fires across the region to rapidly grow in scale and intensity, and persist for several days. Between 10 and 20 August, fires in northern Portugal and the Spanish regions of Galicia, Castilla y León and Extremadura produced approximately three quarters of the 12.5 megatonnes of carbon emissions for all EU countries plus the UK, surpassing the previous highest annual total of 11.8 megatonnes of carbon in 2017.
Air quality impacts and global perspective
Smoke from the fires in Portugal and Spain resulted in increased concentrations of fine-scale particulate matter (PM2.5) and degraded air quality across much of the northwestern region of the Iberian Peninsula for several days through the middle of August. Traces of the smoke were also transported towards northwestern Europe, which had been experiencing the latest episode of long-range smoke transport from Canadian wildfires a few days before. Wildfires in Canada have been extreme for the third consecutive year, with 2025 having the second-highest annual total emissions, exceeded only by the record set in 2023. Long-range smoke transport across the Atlantic to Europe has been particularly prominent in 2025, with several episodes in June, July and August monitored by CAMS and well observed in different measurements at several European sites.
Why wildfires are forecast and monitored
Wildfires represent a diverse range of impacts across different scales, from risk to human life and infrastructure, local air quality degradation in downwind regions to long-range effects at both continental and inter-continental scales. Wildfires are driven by rapidly changing weather, slow growing fuels and stochastic ignition sources, making them difficult to anticipate. The SPARKY-PoF system provides real-time 10-day forecasts of the probability of an active fire detection within each 1 km grid cell. Forecasting provides an early-warning capability to support preparedness, risk reduction and response planning. CAMS near real-time monitoring of wildfire emissions around the world and the impacts on atmospheric composition are essential for evaluating the CAMS forecast performance. It also enables applications of CAMS open data on significant episodes which can lead to degraded air quality in near real-time.