Wildfires in Spain have decreased over the last 50 years

According to a recent study, global fire numbers, intensity, and burned area declined overall from 2003 to 2023. Spain has been no exception, says Fernando del Pino Calvo Sotelo. According to the Ministry of Ecological Transition itself, the area burned by fires over the past 50 years has also decreased.

Global fire numbers, intensity, and burned area have declined. (Source: Shutterstock)

Fernando del Pino Calvo Sotelo
Date: 1 August 2026

Publishing an article on climate change under this title in the midst of a summer heat wave has become something of a tradition.

This is how we fight the usual climate alarmism campaign, which hibernates like bears only to resurface with a vengeance every summer, capitalizing on the season’s typical heat waves (summer: “the hottest time of the year”).

The scare campaigns we endure every summer always follow the same pattern: sea temperatures, unsettling-looking insects, heat waves with record-breaking temperatures, and wildfires supposedly linked to global warming. Given the scale of this summer’s wildfires in Spain, I will focus on this last issue.

Wildfires

The severe wildfires in Ávila and Madrid (Spain), which, having occurred in populated areas, have affected tens of thousands of people, come on top of the one that struck Andalusia a few weeks ago, the severity of which was marked by the tragic loss of human lives. At that time, the reaction of the political authorities —the Spanish PM and the President of the Regional Government of Andalusia—consisted of putting up a smokescreen to avoid taking any responsibility and entering into a tacit pact of silence to avoid blaming one another.

Thus, they first blamed the poor victims —who can no longer defend themselves and who acted as best they could in an extreme situation— and then, of course, both pointed to climate change. In their public statements, Sánchez and Moreno also called on citizens to provide earlier warnings, once again subtly shifting the responsibility onto others. However, the government’s own data show that citizens are much more diligent than the state in alerting authorities to these disasters; in 67% of cases, it is calls from private citizens that report the fires¹.

By contrast, neither of the two political leaders said a single word about the investments that should have been made in firefighting capabilities: Spain, for example, has only 7 old, operational firefighting aircraft, compared to the 18 available to Italy, which has 50% less forest area than Spain does.

Sánchez and Moreno also said nothing about prevention protocols, emergency response, or rapid response measures, nor about forest management and clearing of woodlands —efforts hampered by the EU environmentalist dictatorship and the incompetence of our political class.

However, although hardly anyone is surprised by the cynicism of politicians, people continue to fall victim to media sensationalism, which exploits the natural empathy we feel toward the poor families who have lost their homes to create doomsday narratives (calling the wildfire “inextinguishable”) and collective hysteria.

The weak link between wildfires and ambient temperature

In this regard, the power of propaganda is such that it manages to make us believe that ambient temperature could be responsible for a wildfire of this nature. Logically, this is not the case. For combustion to occur, three elements are required: a fuel (in this case, dry wood), an oxidizer (oxygen in the air), and a heat source —which is never the ambient temperature. That’s why, if you pile up some dry twigs on your porch or on the sidewalk in the middle of July under the midday sun, they won’t catch fire spontaneously, even if the thermometer reads 50°. However, if you conduct the same test on a cloudy autumn or winter day, but this time you light the dry twigs with a match even if it’s cold, they’ll burn like a torch, because the heat source —the match— can reach temperatures between 600° and 800°C.

Therefore, ambient temperature will never trigger a fire, since the heat source required for a fire to occur must be so intense that it can only come from human activity (which causes more than 90% of fires) or from lightning. In the case of Spain, the fact that the region with the most hectares burned, relative to its forest area, has traditionally been the cool and humid NW region of Galicia is also an indication that ambient temperature is not a significant factor. Naturally, the primary factor in the spread of a fire is wind, which increases both the fuel —by spreading heat sources— and oxygen.

Let’s look at some other examples. In Canada —where 3 million hectares have burned this year— there are currently large active wildfires in areas of British Columbia that are experiencing maximum temperatures of around 20° and minimum temperatures of just 7° C². And in southern Africa, the peak wildfire season coincides with the southern hemisphere winter, when minimum temperatures hover around 8°C, since that is when the dry season occurs³

In other words, forests do not burn because it is hot, but because the underbrush is dry; in many regions of the world —such as Europe— the warm season and the dry season coincide, but in other parts of the globe, the opposite is true.

In Spain, nearly 60% of all fires whose cause is known or presumed are intentionally set (not only maliciously), while 34% result from accidents or negligence, and 6% are caused by lightning⁴. In the U.S., these figures are similar⁵, although in sparsely populated Canada, about 50% of fires are caused by lightning.

The main causes of negligence and accidents include agricultural burning, sparks from engines and machinery, power line failures, forestry work, improperly extinguished cigarette butts, bonfires, barbecues, or trash disposal.

Climate change or sheer incompetence?

Linking a wildfire to global warming is an insult to intelligence. In fact, since 1979, the global temperature increase has been 0.16°C per decade—that is, a few hundredths of a degree per year⁶.

Obviously, this measurement —as ridiculously precise as GDP growth calculations— is imperceptible. Nor has this slight increase in global temperature led to an increase in the frequency and severity of droughts, as even the IPCC acknowledges⁷.

What’s more, in recent decades, the area burned by wildfires worldwide has actually decreased. You read that right: fewer and fewer hectares are being burned by wildfires. The FAO, for example, conducted a continent-by-continent analysis (2007–2019) that yielded the following result⁸:

Similarly, a study published in the journal Science concluded that the area burned globally had decreased by 25% from 1999 to 2017⁹, and another more recent study reiterates that “the number and intensity of fires worldwide, as well as the area burned, have decreased over the past two decades”¹⁰. Spain has been no exception, and the area burned by fires over the past 50 years has also decreased, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition itself¹¹:

This data prompts us to ponder: indeed, the slight increase in global temperatures has coincided with a decrease in the area burned worldwide, but that does not mean that the hotter it gets, the fewer wildfires there will be —correlation does not imply causation. Likewise, the fact that the slight rise in global temperatures over the past few decades has coincided with an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere does not necessarily mean that CO2 was the cause of that temperature rise, since we are dealing with multifactor, complex, and chaotic systems that defy simplistic explanations. The same is true about wildfires, which are influenced by spring rainfall, summer drought, winds, topography, the capacity of firefighting resources, and the maintenance and clearing of forested areas.

It should be added that globally the decline in wildfires, the efforts in reforestation, and the increase in the wonderful CO2 (the quintessential food source for trees and plants) —which has significantly increased the planet’s greenery— have meant that deforestation is no longer a global problem. In fact, an analysis of 35 years of satellite data from 1982 to 2016, originally published in the journal Nature, concluded that “the world’s forest area had increased by 2.24 million km²(a 7% increase).” Spain has been no exception: as the country with the third-largest forest area in Europe, it has seen its forests increase by 32% since 1990¹².

Heat waves

The other issue I would like to address in this article is heat waves. Indeed, the Azores High, the main factor controlling Spanish climate, shifts periodically and allows —along with other factors— masses of hot African air to invade us from the south and turn large parts of the Peninsula into an oven. As Inocencio Font, former director of the National Institute of Meteorology (now AEMET), stated in his seminal work Climatology of Spain and Portugal, “there can be abnormally hot periods in any month, although June is the most anomalous in this regard, since, on average, intense heat waves occur during that month once every three years”¹³.

Font notes that during the summer season as a whole, major heat waves occur on average once every four years. These affect the southern half of the Spanish Peninsula most, although they can occasionally affect the north as well, as Font reminds us: San Sebastián, 38° (July 31, 1875), La Coruña, 40° (August 28, 1861), and Bilbao, 42° (September 7, 1987) are clear examples. Finally, Font makes a categorical statement: “Of all the heat waves recorded on the Peninsula, the most significant took place between July and August 1876 [150 years ago], when temperatures in Seville reached 51°”¹⁴.

In July 1995, there was another major heat wave in Spain, with temperatures of 47° recorded in Córdoba and Seville, but the north also experienced extremely high temperatures: Orense reached 42°, and Zamora, 41°. At that time, the ideology of climate change had not yet corrupted scientific institutions, so a report by the National Institute of Meteorology criticized media sensationalism (rather than fueling it, as the AEMET does today): “When extreme weather phenomena of this nature occur, it is common to read or hear comments in the media (press, radio, etc.) that characterize the phenomenon as exceptional.” To counteract such sensationalism, the authors of the report concluded that the 47° recorded in Seville in 1995 “had occurred, on average, once every 50 years, which means that the heat wave that produced such a temperature is not very frequent, but it is not an exceptional phenomenon”¹⁵. In fact, the authors emphasized that temperatures exceeding 46° had also been recorded, for example, in July 1901, August 1909, and August 1949.

In 2003, Spain (and with it, all of Europe) also suffered an unbearable summer heat wave that exceeded the 1995 event in both duration and geographic extent, but at that time, the official journal of the then-National Institute of Meteorology made no mention whatsoever of global warming, merely headlining it “Exceptional heat wave”¹⁶ .

Conclusion

To wrap up the issue of summer temperatures, I must add that the AEMET itself acknowledges in its Report on the State of the Climate in Spain 2025 that the graph of average maximum temperatures for the hottest day “shows no significant trend” since 1975¹⁷:

Similarly, the IPCC itself was forced to acknowledge in its AR5 (2013) that it had only “medium confidence” in the assertion that the duration and frequency of heat waves had increased globally since the mid-20th century, while “there was evidence that some regions of the globe had experienced more heat waves in periods prior to 1950 (for example, the U.S. in the 1930s)”¹⁸.

There have always been and always will be heat waves in the warm season and wildfires in the dry season. These phenomena, which are completely normal, will be particularly severe in some years. It is on these occasions that we must be most vigilant so as not to be swept up by the culture of fear instilled in us by media sensationalism and to ignore the smokescreens of our politicians blaming a non-existent climate emergency: it is these very politicians whom we must demand, on the contrary, to stop lying (and stealing) and provide the necessary resources to mitigate the damage caused by such phenomena.

In addition to the lack of resources to extinguish fires in Spain we have also suffered widespread power outages caused by the very same environmental fanaticism that prevents the clearing of forests, as well as train derailments and roads riddled with potholes —so the question is: where the hell are our taxes going, managed by a bunch of incompetent clueless people?

Notes:

Forest fires in Spain 2021
Wildfire near Clinton, B.C., expected to grow as dry conditions, stronger winds approach | CBC News
Burned Area Over Africa Reduced by Shortened Dry Season – Mohammed – 2026 – Geophysical Research Letters – Wiley Online Library
Forest fires in Spain 2021
What Causes Wildfires? | WFCA
Roy Spencer, PhD
IPCC. AR6, WG I, Table 12.12.
Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025
A human-driven decline in global burned area | Science
Divergent trajectories of global fires: Overall decline, regional intensification – ScienceDirect
GENERAL STATISTICS ON FOREST FIRES (EGIF)
The Growth of Forests in Spain 1991–2025
I. FONT. Climatology of Spain and Portugal (University of Salamanca Press, 2007) pp. 230ff.
Ibid.
olacalor_cal96.pdf
Eo-29.pdf
Report on the State of Spain’s Climate 2025
IPCC, AR5, WGI, 2.6.1.

This article was published on Fernando del Pino Calvo Sotelo’s website on 30 July 2026.

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