Today’s European children face nearly double the extreme fire weather of their grandparents

A child born in Europe in 2025 will live through more than three additional years of extreme fire weather compared with someone born in 1950 if current climate policies continue, according to new research published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. That figure represents an 84 percent increase in lifetime exposure for today’s newborns relative to their grandparents’ generation, and the analysis shows that the overwhelming majority of that increase—86 percent—is attributable to climate change itself rather than to the simple fact that children born today will live longer lives. The finding places wildfire risk squarely within the growing body of evidence on intergenerational climate inequality, quantifying for the first time at a European scale how the burden of dangerous fire conditions will accumulate across the lifespan of the youngest generation.

The study, led by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, defines fire weather as the combination of hot, dry and windy conditions that make fires more likely to ignite, allow them to spread faster, and render them harder to suppress. These meteorological ingredients are being intensified by global warming, which is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. As temperatures rise and heatwaves and droughts become more frequent and severe, fire risk is being pushed into seasons and regions that were rarely exposed before, threatening lives, homes, infrastructure and ecosystems. By translating daily fire weather conditions into cumulative lifetime exposure, the researchers were able to compare the hazard faced by different birth cohorts across Europe under a range of warming scenarios.

The projected increases are not evenly distributed across the continent. The largest burden falls on the Mediterranean, a region already hard-hit by wildfires in recent years. Under a scenario in which global warming reaches 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2100—the trajectory expected under current climate policies—people born in 2025 in this region are projected to face up to 2.5 times the lifetime exposure to extreme fire weather experienced by those born in 1950. In absolute terms, that corresponds to more than five additional years of life spent under dangerous fire conditions. For communities across Southern Europe where fire already shapes the landscape and the economy, the findings suggest that the coming decades will bring a fundamentally different and more hazardous relationship with fire.

Portugal illustrates the scale of the shift in stark numerical terms. The country has already recorded the highest proportion of its area burned of any European nation in recent decades, and the new analysis projects that extreme fire weather days in Portugal will more than double, from 14 days per year during the 1950 to 1970 period to 32 days per year by 2100 under current policies. A child born in Portugal in 2025 is projected to spend approximately 6.5 years of their life under extreme fire weather conditions. In the most exposed regions of northeastern Portugal, children born today will confront up to 2.5 times as much extreme fire weather as people born in 1950. Perhaps most striking is the sensitivity calculation: each additional degree of global warming by the end of the century adds around 272 days of extreme fire weather to the lifetime of a Portuguese child born in 2025.

The research arrives against the backdrop of an already deteriorating fire regime in Europe. In 2025, fires burned through the largest area ever recorded on the continent, exceeding one million hectares, with Spain and Portugal suffering the worst impacts. The 2026 fire season has already brought devastating blazes to France, Spain and Belgium, driven in large part by repeated heatwaves since the beginning of the summer. Attribution studies indicate that these heatwaves would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, underscoring the direct link between fossil fuel emissions and the meteorological conditions that fuel catastrophic fires. What was once a seasonal and regional hazard is becoming a chronic, continent-wide threat.

The study’s authors emphasize that the future it describes is not inevitable. Rapidly cutting fossil fuel use would reduce exposure to dangerous fire weather in every European region, decreasing lifetime exposure for children born in 2025 by 1.3 years on average across Europe, and by more than two years for the most affected regions of Southern Europe. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in line with the Paris Agreement, would substantially reduce lifetime exposure for young people across the continent, cutting it by more than a year for children born in Portugal in 2025 compared with the trajectory implied by current policies. The difference between these pathways, the researchers argue, is measured not in abstract temperature anomalies but in years of childhood, education and adult life spent under threat of fire.

Rosa Pietroiusti, lead author of the study and a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, said the results reveal a generational divide in climate hazard that is qualitatively different from anything previous cohorts experienced. According to Pietroiusti, the level of fire hazard that today’s children will face across their lives is fundamentally different from what their grandparents knew, with a child born in Europe now set to spend years more of their life under extreme fire weather conditions, and with the Mediterranean bearing an especially heavy burden. She noted that young people have done the least to cause climate change yet will live with its consequences for the longest, a disparity that helps explain why youth-led climate justice movements and legal initiatives are demanding more ambitious climate action from governments and companies so that the worst impacts of future climate-related hazards can be avoided.

Senior author Wim Thiery, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, framed the findings as both a warning and an opportunity. The hopeful part of the results, he said, is that this future is not yet fixed: ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now can significantly reduce wildfire risk and protect children from the worst outcomes. With the falling costs of solar and wind power, rapid cuts to fossil fuel use are absolutely feasible, and every fraction of a degree of warming avoided translates directly into less fire weather over a child’s lifetime. Thiery argued that this means fewer lives cut cruelly short, fewer homes and dreams burned by flames, and fewer people traumatized by injury and grief. He stressed that cutting emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, alongside investment in fire prevention, preparedness and more resilient landscapes, is essential to shield young Europeans from a future of relentless and potentially lethal fire seasons.

Beyond the physical science, the study contributes to a growing literature on intergenerational climate injustice. Young people, who have contributed least to historical greenhouse gas emissions, are set to bear a disproportionate share of future fire hazard while simultaneously being asked to shoulder much of the responsibility for cutting emissions. The legal dimensions of this inequity are already being tested: in 2020, after living through devastating wildfires and intense heatwaves, six Portuguese youth filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights against European countries for failing to take sufficient action on climate change. The new exposure figures provide a quantitative foundation for such claims, translating abstract warming targets into concrete, lived experience. The researchers’ central message is that the faster emissions are cut now, the smaller the hazard faced by the youngest generations—and that every year of delayed action is written into the lifetimes of children who have no say in the decisions being made today.

Subject of Research: Projected lifetime exposure of European birth cohorts to extreme fire weather under climate change

Article Title: Children born today in Europe will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents

Article References: Children born today in Europe will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fire weather, climate change, Europe, wildfires, intergenerational justice, Portugal, Mediterranean, emissions cuts, Paris Agreement, Environmental Research Letters, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, heatwaves