Experts on future fires: "We're working on the assumption that everything will burn."

If you currently have a forested area nearby, take a good look at it and try to remember that piece of Spain's 28 million hectares of forested land , because it won't last long. "We're working with the assumption that everything is going to burn," warns forestry engineer and fire expert Federico Grillo. "What we have to think about is how it's going to burn."

I don't know if you still thought otherwise, but in the next decade, forest fires in Spain will not only not decrease, but are very likely to become more frequent, more intense, and spread across more hectares. According to models from the Spanish Meteorological Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our country could face between 41 and 50 days of extreme heat annually by 2050 , which would mean two to six more weeks of fire risk per year.

" Heat waves are like vegetation coming out of a toaster ," Grillo describes. "Sooner or later it's going to burn, and the longer it takes, the more violent the fire will be." In pine forests and scrublands, fires will be harder to control and can break out at almost any time of year. Grillo explains that "nature has cycles," and that fires also occurred before humans: "One in five are caused by lightning." But by extinguishing them, he explains, "we have changed these cycles."

A 2023 study on fuel moisture in our forests predicts that the fire season could extend up to 20 days under a moderate scenario, and up to 50 days under an extreme scenario. The burned area will increase by between 12% and 50% per decade.

The frequency and magnitude of energetically extreme wildfires has doubled over the past two decades, and has now worsened, with the six years of highest incidence of these fires occurring since 2017 , according to a study published in Nature .

The phenomenon of these sixth-generation fires was identified in Spain last July with the Lleida fire. They are so closely linked to the climate that they can create their own meteorological conditions, such as pyrocumulus and firestorms. "We've been aware of the existence of these fires since 2016, but we're in 2025; there's been plenty of time, for a normal society, to take action, and we haven't . If you rely on extinction, you're causing more and more land to burn," notes Víctor Resco de Dios, professor of Forestry Engineering at the University of Lleida.

But not everything will burn equally. "Areas that weren't burning, such as humid forests, mountain forests, and the Pyrenees, will become flammable. The fire belt will gain height and altitude ," Resco points out. Studies have calculated a safety margin for this to begin to occur, and it's narrowing. "As soon as there's a heat wave that increases the average temperature by five degrees, the Pyrenees, for example, will become a very dangerous place. That's definitely going to happen by the end of the century; what we don't know is if it will happen in ten years."

At the same time, there will be fewer fires in the Mediterranean, which won't be good news: "It hasn't been proven that it rains less, but there's more drought, the air is getting thirstier, desertification will increase, and there will come a time in the future when there will be nothing left to burn."

In the short term, Resco sees a pitfall in the fact that we've seen a reduction in the number of hectares burned in recent years: "There will be a rebound. By putting out the fires, we're creating a deficit in burned area. In many areas of our country, fires should burn 7% of the forest area, and it has to happen every 15 years, so that the surface area doesn't gain much ground. But now 0.3% is being burned, which increases the likelihood of a major fire."

Eduardo Rojas, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, agrees: "The virulence of the fires is undoubtedly due to the exacerbation of climate change, but no less so to rural abandonment, or to the policy of systematically extinguishing all fires."

Speaking to the Science Media Centre , Rojas believes that "we must maintain biomass levels that can be managed by fire-fighting services. And that requires reversing rural abandonment, fighting for extensive agriculture and livestock farming, overcoming Edenist conservationism , and integrating burning as the vaccine that will allow the territory to overcome the challenge of fire without it becoming a catastrophe."

After publishing a graph of rising global temperatures, Cristi Proistosescu, a professor of climate dynamics at the University of Illinois, tweeted: "I just want to make sure the graph is clear: Don't think of this as the warmest August of the last century. Think of it as one of the coolest Augusts of the next century." To which one could add physicist Albert Allen Bartlett's quote: "The greatest failing of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

Resco doesn't dare extrapolate this idea to the fires, but warns that what we're experiencing this summer: "It's just the trailer, the preview of the future that is yet to come, but of a future that we are creating for ourselves."

In early 2020, the Australian bushfires blocked solar radiation on a global scale, generating an autonomous anticyclonic vortex 1,000 kilometers in diameter with its own ozone hole. The incandescent smoke columns rose to an altitude of 35 kilometers, twice as high as any known pyrocumulus cloud injection, altering the climate in the stratosphere for three months. But now, southwest Australia has become an example of management, and a formula for success for Resco: "They've managed to manage fire and turn it into an ally, not an enemy. Fires will always be here because they've existed for 400 million years; the problem is what we do with them."