Europe Is Burning Again. This Time, Three Forces Are Colliding

On the morning of July 10, firefighting aircraft that are normally stationed in southern France were redeployed to the Paris region. That had never happened before. The reason was an 800-hectare fire burning through the Fontainebleau forest, 60 kilometres from the capital, forcing the evacuation of 900 homes and cutting off motorway and rail links south out of the city.

Four days earlier, wildfires in Almeria in southern Spain had killed at least 13 people. Before that, fires in Portugal. Before that, Greece. By July 8, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) had recorded over 155,500 hectares burned across the EU since January. That is well above the 20-year average for this point in the year.

The obvious instinct is to call this a bad luck season. It is not. What is happening in 2026 is the result of three separate forces hitting Europe at the same time, and understanding how they interact matters.

Force One: The Winter That Soaked Everything, Then Vanished

Europe had an unusually wet winter in 2025-26. That sounds like a good thing for wildfire risk, but it is more complicated than that. A wet winter produces dense ground vegetation: grasses, shrubs, undergrowth. When spring arrived early and hotter than normal, that vegetation dried out fast. Instead of a landscape that was simply dry, you had a landscape loaded with biomass that had been growing under ideal conditions and then turned to kindling in a matter of weeks.

Fire scientists have a phrase for this: the "wet-dry whiplash." It is a pattern that is becoming more common across the Mediterranean and Atlantic edges of Europe, and it produces fire conditions that are more severe than a straightforwardly dry landscape. There is simply more fuel.

Force Two: El Nino Is Back and Strengthening

Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific are significantly above average again. NOAA and the WMO have confirmed that El Nino conditions are officially present and intensifying. Models currently put the probability of this developing into a strong event at over 80% by the end of 2026, potentially persisting into early 2027.

El Nino's influence on European weather is indirect but real. It reshapes the jet stream, which controls where high-pressure systems sit over the continent. In a strengthening El Nino year, those high-pressure systems tend to lock in over Western and Southern Europe during summer, blocking the Atlantic weather systems that would otherwise bring cooler, wetter air. The result is prolonged heat and no rain, for weeks at a time.

June 2026 was the warmest June on record for Western Europe. Three consecutive heatwaves followed. By the time July arrived, soils across much of the continent were at or near historic low moisture levels. The European Copernicus Climate Change Service has been flagging these conditions since April. It was not hard to see this coming.

Force Three: The Baseline Has Shifted

The third force is the one that does not go away between seasons. Europe is warming at roughly twice the global average rate. The 1.5°C threshold that climate negotiations have treated as a ceiling has already been crossed for European mean temperatures in summer. The baseline from which every heatwave, every drought, every fire season now starts is higher than it was 30 years ago.

What this means in practice is that the conditions required to produce a major fire are easier to reach. A heatwave that in 1995 would have left vegetation stressed but manageable now tips it into critical dryness. Winds that in 2005 would have spread a contained fire slowly now drive it fast enough to overwhelm firebreaks. The Fontainebleau fire is a useful example: a fire of that scale in a forest that close to Paris would have been almost unimaginable 20 years ago. Today it is a serious operational event, but not a shock.

This is the interaction between climate change and El Nino that scientists have been warning about. El Nino is a natural cycle that has always existed. But El Nino events on top of a warmer baseline produce outcomes that are qualitatively different from El Nino events in a cooler climate. The 2015-16 El Nino was the strongest ever recorded up to that point. The fires and droughts it drove globally were severe. The 2026 event is emerging from a higher starting temperature and onto landscapes that have already had their resilience eroded by years of above-average heat.

What the EU Is Doing About It

The European response has been large in scale. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism, and specifically the rescEU program, has deployed what it is describing as its largest-ever cross-border mobilization of fire resources. Firefighters and aircraft from multiple member states have been pre-positioned in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus ahead of peak fire risk periods, rather than waiting for fires to break out and then requesting assistance.

This is an improvement on the coordination failures of past seasons. But it is a response to a symptom, not the underlying condition. Moving aircraft around faster does not address why the fires are getting worse.

The Rest of the Summer

The fire season in Europe typically peaks between July and September. El Nino is expected to continue strengthening through that period. The drought conditions across southern and western Europe are not going to reverse in the short term. The 2026 season is not over, and there is no obvious reason to expect conditions to ease significantly before autumn.

The EFFIS data gives some context. The 155,500 hectares burned by early July is serious, but it is below the same period in 2025, which was the worst year on record. Whether 2026 ends up worse or better than that depends heavily on what happens over the next two months, and on whether Europe gets any significant rainfall across the drought-affected regions.

What is not in question is the direction of travel. Fire seasons in Europe are getting longer. The areas at risk are extending northward. The fires that used to be a Mediterranean problem are now, as Fontainebleau makes clear, a continental one. And the technology and infrastructure that drive much of modern European life, including the data centers that run AI systems, are part of the same energy system whose emissions are making this worse. Every large language model query, every data center cooling cycle, every server kept running overnight, adds incrementally to the baseline that is making European summers more dangerous.