Europe records highest wildfire carbon emissions on record in 2025

European wildfire emissions have surged to record levels in 2025, according to data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). The combined carbon emissions from wildfires across the European Union and the United Kingdom are estimated at nearly 13 megatonnes, marking the highest annual total since monitoring began.

The spike in emissions follows a devastating wildfire season - particularly severe on the Iberian Peninsula, where persistent heatwaves, extreme dryness, and strong winds triggered widespread fires. Smoke from the blazes spread across Europe, pushing concentrations of harmful fine particulates (PM2.5) and other pollutants well beyond safe limits in many regions, posing serious risks to air quality and public health.

Beyond carbon, the fires have wrought extensive environmental damage: huge areas of forest and land have burned - in some countries more than a million hectares so far this year - altering habitats, increasing soil erosion, and amplifying the risks of future droughts and biodiversity loss.

The tragic outcome underscores how climate change - through hotter summers, drier conditions and more frequent heatwaves - is intensifying wildfire risks in Europe. Experts warn that without significant mitigation, adaptation, and improved forest-management efforts, such disaster seasons may become the new norm.

13 megatonnes of wildfire carbon emissions in a single year across the EU and UK - the highest on record - represents both a climate consequence and a climate feedback. Wildfires release stored carbon while reducing forest carbon-sink capacity, creating a compounding effect that undermines assumed land-based emissions absorption in national and regional climate targets.

The Iberian Peninsula concentration reflects the drier and hotter Mediterranean conditions that climate models have projected for decades. PM2.5 pollution reaching harmful levels across wide geographic areas creates public-health exposure that extends far beyond the direct fire footprint - an under-appreciated cost dimension of wildfire seasons.

For agricultural, forestry, insurance and real-estate clients with Mediterranean or fire-prone regional exposure, Cognitud's climate action, nature-based solutions and impact assessment teams help clients evaluate physical-climate-risk exposure to wildfire regimes, structure adaptation and forest-management investment cases, and prepare disclosures aligned with TCFD, ISSB S2 and jurisdictional climate-adaptation frameworks that increasingly require quantified wildfire-linked risk analysis.