A new paper in Environmental Research Letters quantifies how exposure to extreme fire weather adds up over a lifetime for different generations across Europe, down to the regional level. Extreme fire weather is based on Fire Weather Index (FWI) daily values exceeding their local 95th percentile in a 1985-2014 reference period. The authors analysed projections of FWI from an ensemble of downscaled CMIP6 models, and used data on population and life expectancy to estimate lifetime exposure to extreme fire weather at national and sub-national level. Young people will face much more meteorological fire hazard across their lives, in particular in already fire-prone regions of Southern Europe.

Key findings:
• Under a current climate policies pathway leading to ~2.6°C of global warming in 2100, across Europe children born in 2025 are projected to experience on average 3.2 additional years of extreme fire weather over their lifetimes compared to people born in 1950, an 84% increase.
• Increases are largest in Southern and Mediterranean Europe: in some regions, children born in 2025 are projected to experience more than 5 additional years and up to 2.5 times as much extreme fire weather as people born in 1950.
• Each additional degree of end-of-century warming adds hundreds of days of extreme fire weather to the life of a child born in 2025: ~470 days in Greece, ~450 in Spain and Italy, ~430 in France and Belgium, ~270 in Portugal.
• Limiting warming to 1.5°C would cut lifetime exposure for children born in 2025 by 1.3 years on average compared with current policies, and by more than 2 years in the hardest-hit parts of Southern Europe.

Read the full article and look at results for your region here


Authors: Rosa Pietroiusti, Jessica Hetzer, Marco Turco, Amaury Laridon, Quentin Lejeune, Sergio Prudencio, Dominik Paprotny, Wim Thiery