The extreme conditions that fueled last month’s devastating wildfires across Spain and Portugal were made 40 times more likely by climate change, according to new research.

The blazes scorched around 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of land in just a few weeks, with scientists estimating the fires were also 30% more intense than they would have been in a pre-industrial climate. The findings come from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network, which investigates the role of global heating in extreme weather events.

“The sheer size of these fires has been astonishing,” said Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study. “Hotter, drier and more flammable conditions are becoming more severe with climate change, and are giving rise to fires of unprecedented intensity.”

Researchers noted that before industrialisation, such extreme conditions would have been expected only once every 500 years. Today, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, they can be expected roughly every 15 years.

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A strong link between climate change and extreme heat

The study also found an even stronger link between climate change and extreme heat. 10-day maximum temperatures in the Iberian Peninsula, which in the past might have occurred only once every 2,500 years, are now projected to strike every 13 years.

Unlike WWA’s typical model-based assessments, the preliminary analysis of the Iberian wildfires relied mainly on observed weather data. A fuller investigation of recent fires in Greece and Turkey, published last week, concluded that climate change had made those conditions 10 times more likely.

Researchers also highlighted land-use changes that have exacerbated the risk. Rural depopulation and the abandonment of farmland across Mediterranean regions have left vast swathes of unmanaged vegetation, providing abundant fuel for wildfires.

David Garcia, an applied mathematician at the University of Alicante, said the Spanish debate had largely focused on rural decline rather than climate impacts. “However, much less has been said about the effect of climate change on these fires, which, as has been demonstrated, has been immense,” he noted.

In response to the crisis, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez unveiled a 10-point climate action plan this week. In an interview with The Guardian, he warned that political resistance to climate measures is growing as mainstream conservative parties adopt the rhetoric of the far right.

“The problem that we’re now facing is that there are traditional rightwing parties that perhaps don’t deny the scientific reality, but which act and behave as if climate change doesn’t exist. And this is the biggest problem,” Sanchez stressed.