# Europe’s 2025 wildfire season in five charts

Data snapshot: 28 October 2026. Charts and calculations: NuraGaze.
Article: https://nuragaze.com/articles/europes-2025-wildfire-season-in-five-charts/

The charts are original redraws of the data below. They are not official
Copernicus graphics and do not imply endorsement. Source values are preserved in
`raw/`; the five named CSVs contain exactly the plotted series, in their original
units. Display labels are rounded. Data tables round decimals to three places.

## 1. Annual burned area

- Primary source: EFFIS / Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS).
- API: https://api2.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/statistics/v2/effis/estimatesbycountry?country=EU
- Saved response: `raw/effis-eu-annual.json`.
- Chart data: `annual-area.csv`.
- Coverage: EU27, complete calendar years 2006–2025, fires ≥30 hectares.
- The raw response also includes partial 2026 data; the chart explicitly excludes it.
- Unit: hectares (`ba`). The plot scales values to millions of hectares.
- 2025: 1,034,552 ha. Previous maximum, 2017: 988,524 ha.
- Arithmetic mean of 2006–2024 annual totals: 354,842.5263157895 ha.
- Ratio of 2025 to that mean: about 2.92.
- Hectares to square kilometres: divide by 100.

## 2. Country burned area

- Primary source: EFFIS / CEMS.
- API: https://api2.effis.emergency.copernicus.eu/statistics/v2/effis/estimatesoverview?countries=AUT,BEL,BGR,HRV,CYP,CZE,DNK,EST,FIN,FRA,DEU,GRC,HUN,IRL,ITA,LVA,LTU,LUX,MLT,NLD,POL,PRT,ROU,SVK,SVN,ESP,SWE,ALB,AND,BIH,XKO,MNE,MKD,NOR,SRB,CHE,TUR,UKR,GBR&year=2025&yearFrom=2006&yearTo=2024&firesize=30
- Saved response: `raw/effis-countries-2025.json`.
- Chart data: `country-area.csv`.
- Filter: EU27 only, 2025, fires ≥30 hectares. The raw response also has non-EU countries, which are excluded.
- Unit: hectares. Chart scales values to thousands of hectares.
- Top five by burned area: Spain 393,079; Portugal 278,917; Romania 129,443;
  Italy 84,348; Greece 47,819. Other EU countries combined: 100,946 ha.
- All non-null mapped EU national totals sum to the annual EU total, 1,034,552.
  Null entries are preserved in the source and are not presented as measured zeroes.
- The remainder is the EU total minus the top five. It is shown separately after
  the ranked countries because it is a group, not another country.
- Spain plus Portugal: 671,996 / 1,034,552 = 64.9553%, rounded to 65%.
- These are absolute areas, not shares of each country's land or forest area.

## 3. Timing

- Primary source: EFFIS / CEMS / C3S / ECMWF, European State of the Climate 2025,
  supplementary figure S6.3.
- Report: https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2025/wildfires
- Source CSV: https://climate.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/custom-uploads/ESOTC-2025/06-wildfires/figS06.3_ESOTC2025/figS06.3_ESOTC_2025_Wildfires_Burn_areas_Europe_2025_EFFIS_DATA.csv
- Saved source: `raw/effis-eu-cumulative-2025.csv`.
- Chart data: `season-timing.csv`.
- Coverage: EU27, fires ≥30 hectares, weekly observations from 7 January to
  30 December 2025. Unit: cumulative hectares; plot scales to millions.
- Series used: `Year 2025` and `Average (2006 - 2024)`. The average including 2025
  is deliberately not used. No smoothing or monthly interpolation is applied.
- Increase from 5 to 19 August: 964,680 − 379,392 = 585,288 ha.
- By 26 August: 983,367 / 1,034,552 = approximately 95.05% of the annual total.
- The final weekly baseline is 354,638.11 ha. It differs slightly from the complete
  annual average in chart 1. It is retained as published, not silently replaced.
- Observation dates describe the cumulative mapped series; they are not exact
  ignition times or an individual fire's spread rate.

## 4. Carbon emissions

- Primary source: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), GFAS v1.2;
  C3S / ECMWF, European State of the Climate 2025, figure 6.3.
- Source CSV: https://climate.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/custom-uploads/ESOTC-2025/06-wildfires/fig06.3_ESOTC2025/fig06.3_ESOTC_2025_Wildfires_total_monthly_wildfire_carbon_emissions_2025_EU_UK_CAMS_GFAS_DATA.csv
- Saved source: `raw/cams-monthly-carbon-2025.csv`.
- Chart data: `carbon-emissions.csv`.
- Unit: million tonnes (megatonnes, Mt) of carbon, **not CO2 or CO2-equivalent**.
- Monthly 2025 estimates compared with the 2003–2019 mean for each month.
- Reporting region (25 countries), as specified in the source chart: Austria,
  Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany,
  Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland,
  Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
  This differs from the EU27 in charts 1–3; it excludes Belgium, Luxembourg and
  Malta and includes the UK.
- August 2025: 9.6164626 Mt carbon; August baseline: 2.1107544 Mt carbon.
- Ratio: approximately 4.56. August's share of the sum of the twelve 2025 months:
  approximately 69.60%, rounded to 70%.
- These are emissions estimates, not measurements of local pollution exposure.

## 5. Extreme fire weather

- Primary source: CEMS / C3S / ECMWF, European State of the Climate 2025,
  figure 6.4. Fire Weather Index based on ERA5.
- Source ZIP: https://climate.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/custom-uploads/ESOTC-2025/06-wildfires/fig06.4_ESOTC2025/fig06.4_DATA.zip
- CSV member: `fig06.4_ESOTC_2025_Wildfires_days_fire_weather_index_above_95_NW_Iberia_1970_2025_FWI_ERA5_DATA.csv`.
- Saved unmodified CSV: `raw/iberian-fire-weather.csv`.
- Chart data: `fire-weather.csv` (columns `year`, `days` from the source).
- Coverage: the northwestern Iberian study area in the map inset of figure 6.4,
  encompassing parts of northwestern Spain and northern Portugal, not whole countries.
- Unit: number of extreme fire-weather days in August, annual series 1970–2025.
- Definition: Fire Weather Index above the reference period's 95th percentile,
  not the separate absolute FWI ≥50 metric elsewhere in the report.
- 2025: 18 days. The published 1991–2020 baseline (`climate`) is
  4.433333333333334 days, verified against the mean of those 30 years' `days` values.
- The article reports 4.4 days and the chart labels 4.43. Approximately 4.06 times
  the baseline. This index describes weather favouring fire, not the number of fires.

## Why another report gives a higher EU total

The JRC's *Advance report on forest fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa
2025* (31 March 2026; JRC146199; DOI 10.2760/3859043) explains on printed page 8
that historical comparisons exclude fires under 30 ha, while its 2025-only totals
include smaller mapped fires. Its full mapped EU total is 1,079,538 ha. Charts
1–3 consistently use the historical-comparison threshold and total of 1,034,552 ha.

EFFIS mapping covers natural vegetation beyond forests, can include prescribed
burns, and can include agricultural or urban parts of a mapped wildland fire.
It need not match national definitions or statistics. These are satellite-based
mapped estimates, not a count of every ignition.

Report: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC146199

## Attribution and reuse

EFFIS data: © European Union, reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . Source licence:
https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/about-effis/data-license . Changes:
filtered series, aggregated country remainder, calculated percentages and ratios,
new chart design and display rounding. No underlying source values are altered.

Charts 3–5 contain modified Copernicus Climate Change Service and Atmosphere
Monitoring Service information (2026). Credit: EFFIS / CEMS / CAMS / C3S / ECMWF,
as specified for each chart above. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is
responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data here.
Copernicus product licence:
https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/licences/licence-to-use-copernicus-products

The code is `scripts/generate-europe-2025-charts.py`. It reads the frozen inputs
without network access, checks the EU total against national and weekly series,
checks the weather baseline, and writes desktop/mobile SVGs, standalone PNGs,
CSV downloads and the accessible table data used by the article.