Climate change did not have a statistically significant impact on the wildfires that hit Chile earlier this month, according to a new rapid attribution study by the World Weather Attribution service (WWA).
In early February, a series of wildfires broke out across the coast of Chile. Within just days, they burned more than 29,000 hectares of land, destroying more than 7,000 homes and killing more than 130 people.
“The wildfires were the world’s deadliest since the 2009 Australia bushfires,” according to the WWA.
The authors warn that “global warming will likely increase the risk of fire conditions in central Chile” if temperatures rise by 2C above pre-industrial temperatures. Moreover, it is already making the country hotter and drier – both risk factors for wildfires.
The study finds that climate change had made the observed fire conditions more likely, but this result was not statistically significant, meaning it could have occurred by chance.
The findings are also subject to fairly wide uncertainty. One reason is that coastal Chile is seeing a slight local cooling effect, the researchers say, due to shifting weather patterns.
In addition, the study notes that changes in land use – such as the growth of informal settlements in forest zones and widespread conversion towards non-native species and monoculture plantations – are making many regions of Chile “significantly more vulnerable” to wildfires.
’Perfect storm’
Forest fires in the Valparaíso region in central Chile started on 2 February. They then “spread rapidly through mountainous forests near Viña del Mar, Quilpué and Villa Alemana… [and] moved extremely quickly into the outskirts of cities”, WWA says in a press release, leaving more than 29,000 hectares burned since 4 February.
Chilean president Gabriel Boric described the fires as “the biggest tragedy we have experienced as a country since the earthquake of 27 February 2010”, according to La Tercera.
The most up-to-date death toll remains at 132, Chile’s La Tercera reported, while El Mercurio reported on the mental health impacts of the fires, with affected people suffering from anxiety and stress.
According to Diálogo Chino, Boric said that evacuating people had been made difficult by the speed at which the fires were spreading – in some areas at more than 10km per hour, faster than most people can walk.
The map below, taken from the attribution study, shows the burned area across the Viña del Mar-Valparaíso sector, highlighted in red. The yellow circles show active fires on 2 February.
In an article by the NASA Earth Observatory, NASA research scientist Dr Elizabeth Wiggins suggested the wildfires “were the product of a perfect storm of conditions”, adding that “they occurred during a heatwave, drought and high-wind event borne from a combination of El Niño and climate change”.
Hot, dry and windy
The attribution study assesses the role of climate change on Chile’s fires between 31 January and 4 February, as these were the “highest fire intensity” days, when most of the impacts occurred, according to the study authors.
The intensity of a wildfire is influenced by a wide range of factors, such as atmospheric moisture, wind speed and fuel availability. The authors of this study focus on the “hot dry windy index” (HDWI) – a measure which combines maximum temperature, relative humidity and wind speed.
The study notes that this index does not take into account factors – such as the build-up of fuel – as other more “complex” indices do. However, the authors say the index is “an effective hazard metric for estimating threat to communities and difficulty of containment”.
The map below shows the maximum of average four-day HDWI between 31 January and 4 February 2024. Darker red indicates a higher HDWI, signifying hotter, windier and less humid conditions. The blue box indicates the study area.
To put the wildfire into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analyse a timeseries of HDWI. They find that the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the wildfires of February 2024 are a one-in-30 year event in today’s climate.
To assess the role that climate change played in creating these weather conditions, the scientists use climate models to compare HDWI in this coastal region of Chile in the world as it is today, with a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.
This is one approach to attribution, the fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events.
The study finds a “small increase” in the HDWI due to climate change, but says that the trend is not “statistically significant”. (A statistically significant result would mean that an HWDI index as high as that seen during the wildfires in Chile is unlikely to be explained by chance.)
The authors also assess the individual components of the HDWI – maximum temperature, relative humidity and wind speed – but again find no “significant” trend due to climate change.
The study also uses two different indices to assess the extent whether the natural climate phenomenon El Niño had any impact on the dangerous fire weather conditions, but again finds “no significant influence”.
Finally, using the same models, the authors assess whether the fire would be more likely in a warmer world. Although the impact of climate change on fire weather in this year’s Chilean wildfires is “not yet significant”, they find that “global warming will likely increase the risk of fire conditions in central Chile if warming reaches 2C” above pre-industrial temperatures.
(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)
Coastal cooling
It is “not surprising” that climate change did not have a statistically significant impact on Chile’s wildfires, the study says.
The authors explain that the coast of Chile is one of the few places in the world where climate change is causing a slight local cooling effect, due to a high-pressure year-round weather system in the south-east Pacific Ocean called the “South Pacific High”.
The study explains:
“Climate change is causing the South Pacific High to move southwards, leading to stronger southerly winds that are pushing deep, cold water to the coast of Chile. These cold waters replace warm, superficial water in a process called ‘upwelling’, which causes low temperatures along the coast, unlike inland Chile and the rest of South America.”
Tomás Carrasco Escaff, a researcher at the University of Chile’s Climate and Resilience Research Center (CR2) and author on the study, told a press briefing that this shift in the South Pacific High results in “coastal cooling”, which drives down HDWI. However, he adds that it also causes “competing” effects of “greater dryness” and “intensification of wind”, both of which act to increase HDWI.
Coastal cooling is also tricky for climate models to capture accurately – especially as the fires broke out on the “transition between the coast, which is cooling, and the inland part of the country which has a warming trend”, explained Dr Joyce Kimutai, a research associate at Imperial College London.
This, combined with the limited observational data available, means that there is a “relatively large degree of uncertainty” in the results of the study.
Contributing factors
Local media has also reported on the potential drivers of the fires. Citing a recent study, La Tercera said that climate change and El Niño have made the country more prone to “megafires” – those spanning more than 200 hectares.
The research noted that megafires – such as the ones registered in the summer of 2017 and 2023 – were influenced by both the high temperatures driven by El Niño and more frequent and intense heatwaves. It also showed that the central regions from El Maule to Araucanía – to the south of the Valparaíso region – have been the most affected by megafires between 2014 and 2023.
Diálogo Chino cited a 2020 study from CR2, which found that “since 2010, forest fires in south-central Chile have increased in terms of occurrences and area burned, compared to the previous three decades, while the average duration of the fire season has also become longer”.
The article noted that the “fire-affected south-central zone of Chile has been transformed by vast forest plantations of exotic species, especially pine and eucalyptus, introduced for timber and pulp production”. The CR2 study found that “exotic plants can modify the dynamics of forest fires, increasing the speed of spread, as well as their extent, frequency, intensity and seasonality”, the article said.
Diálogo Chino also said that infrastructure in Valparaíso “is another factor explaining the scale of the fires”. It added:
“Some of the burned areas are densely populated, with their expansion having often taken place without planning permission. Additionally, many houses there are informal dwellings that may have been constructed with flammable materials such as wood.”
This aligns with the findings of the attribution study, which notes:
“Fire risk is increasing notably due to current land management practices, such as the expansion of Wildland-Urban Interface areas (including the growth of informal settlements in forest zones) and widespread conversion from native to foreign and monoculture plantations.”
In addition, Diálogo Chino reported that Chile’s minister of the interior and public security Carolina Tohá claimed at least some of the recent fires may have been started intentionally.
Analysis Chile’s National Forest Corporation (CONAF) found that the main cause of 64% of fires in Chile from August 2023 to January 2024 is “negligence”, followed by intentional and accidental fires, and then 0.5% directly started by lightning. Negligence is driven by agricultural burning, which contributed the most to the fires, forestry work and the poor condition of power lines, the analysis found.
New draft law
The fires caused widespread destruction, with BioBioChile reporting that 7,000 houses had been damaged or destroyed. The government has estimated the reconstruction cost at up to $1bn, the outlet noted. Of those homes, 70% were in informal settlements, the attribution study notes.
BioBioChile also reported on the deaths of wildlife – including owls, thrushes, foxes, partridge and chinchilla mice – as a result of the fires.
Pedro Álvarez, forest engineer and forest chair at Reforestemos, a Chilean civil society organisation that implements forest restoration and fire prevention projects, travelled to the affected area. He tells Carbon Brief that some of the ecosystems harmed were native forests – home to native species such as the Chilean palm – and sclerophyllous forests, which are composed of shrubs and trees.
Due to the scale of the fires, a new bill is being discussed in Chile’s congress, and – according to a CONAF press release – the minister of agriculture, Esteban Valenzuela, has urged that this is finalised by April this year.
The draft law aims to prevent forest and rural fires – for example, by implementing spatial planning instruments to set up “measures to manage landscape” and creating preventative management plans on forest land, such as fuel-cutting belts and clearance of combustible material.
Álvarez tells Carbon Brief that the biggest challenge facing Chileans and the state right now is rebuilding the area. He suggests that public policies should focus on preventing fires, enhancing spatial planning and restoring key regions for ecosystem services and biodiversity.
The post No ‘statistically significant’ link between climate change and Chile’s wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
No ‘statistically significant’ link between climate change and Chile’s wildfires
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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