The European Parliament voted on Tuesday to release €120.55 million from its solidarity fund to assist Spain in recovering from heatwaves and wildfires. The European Commission stated it had deployed a record number of firefighters this year to combat wildfires.

As of July 1, wildfires had burned 50,000 hectares in Spain and 28,000 hectares in France. The total area burned in both countries by that date was more than double the seasonal average. Scientists found that the heat in Europe in June would have been "virtually impossible" if the climate had not been affected by the burning of fossil fuels.

Daytime highs during the June heatwave were 10 times more likely than two decades ago, while night-time lows were 100 times more likely. "If a period of active vegetation growth is followed by a period of drought and heat, vegetation becomes stressed and transforms into flammable wildfire fuel," said Julia Miller, a climate scientist at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF.

Miller, the lead author of a recent study on compounding wildfire risks, noted that surface soil moisture in much of Spain was above the seasonal average from March to May, according to Copernicus data. River flow in Spain was also unusually high during this period, driven by an exceptionally wet winter in the Iberian peninsula. Western Europe experienced heatwaves in late May and again at the end of June.

"In most parts of Europe, there is enough vegetation to burn," Miller said, adding that the critical question is when that vegetation becomes dry enough to burn. Southern Europe has experienced increasingly overgrown vegetation as rural villages have lost population, with young people moving to cities and abandoning farmland.

The European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) criticized EU fire policies last year for focusing disproportionately on suppressing blazes after they had started. EASAC called for increased efforts to stop planetary heating and improve landscape planning. Fernando Pulido Díaz, a fire prevention scientist at the University of Extremadura and a co-author of the EASAC report, stated, "Climate itself cannot provoke fires if there is no plant fuel, so fuel availability driven by absence of land management is a critical factor underlying extreme fires."

Pulido Díaz said the issue has been debated in many forums, but there is a general lack of practical implementation beyond pilot projects led by local communities. Fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature have heated Europe about twice as fast as the global average. In February, the EU's science advisers warned that efforts to adapt to a hotter planet were insufficient, incremental and often coming too late. They recommended preparing for 3C of global heating, while also urging greater efforts to meet the 1.5C target of the Paris climate agreement.