Summer has arrived in Europe, and with it the annual reckoning with what climate change is doing to the continent’s weather systems. The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s seasonal outlook for summer 2026 shows elevated temperature probabilities across southern Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, the western Mediterranean basin and parts of central Europe — continuing the pattern of above-average summer temperatures that has characterised every year of the past decade. After one of the driest spring seasons on record in parts of Spain, Portugal, southern France and Italy, the wildfire risk index across significant areas of the Mediterranean enters the summer at high or very high levels. Here is what the forecasts show and how European countries are responding.
The drought baseline entering summer
The European Drought Observatory’s latest assessment shows exceptional drought conditions persisting across much of the Iberian Peninsula following a winter and spring that delivered well below normal precipitation. Portugal’s reservoir levels in several major catchments are at multi-year lows. Parts of southern Spain — Andalucía particularly — are entering the summer with soil moisture deficits that set the conditions for rapid vegetation drying and elevated fire risk. Northern Italy’s Po Valley, which experienced its worst drought on record in 2022, has seen better recovery but remains below the seasonal average. Greece’s Attica region, scarred by the catastrophic 2023 fires, is under close monitoring.
The drought conditions translate directly into wildfire risk through the fuel moisture pathway: vegetation that is dry after a precipitation-deficient spring ignites more easily, burns more intensely, and is harder to contain. The European Forest Fire Information System’s fire weather index for June 2026 shows elevated danger across the typical high-risk zones plus some areas of central Europe — Czech Republic, Austria, parts of Germany — that have experienced drier conditions than historical norms would suggest.
How preparedness has changed since 2021–2023
The wildfire seasons of 2021 (Greece, Turkey), 2022 (France, Spain, Portugal) and 2023 (Greece, again catastrophically) produced both political pressure and practical investment in European wildfire response capacity. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism’s rescEU reserve — a fleet of firefighting aircraft and personnel maintained for EU-level deployment — has been significantly expanded. Aerial firefighting capacity, historically a perennial shortage during simultaneous multi-country fire events, has increased with new aircraft commitments from France, Spain, Greece and Sweden. EU coordination through the Emergency Response Coordination Centre has improved information-sharing and resource deployment in ways that the 2021 Greek fire season, when real-time coordination was visibly lacking, directly prompted.
National preparations have also upgraded. Portugal, which implemented sweeping rural land management reforms after its deadly 2017 and 2018 fire seasons, has continued building its prevention programme — controlled burns, firebreak maintenance, and forest composition changes toward less fire-prone species. Greece has invested heavily in early warning systems and evacuation planning following the Mati disaster of 2018 and the Attica fires of 2023. Spain’s forest fire prevention legislation was strengthened in 2024 to increase landowner responsibilities for vegetation management.
The heat health dimension
Wildfire risk is the most dramatic manifestation of European summer heat, but excess mortality from heat stress is the larger public health challenge. The 2003 European heatwave killed an estimated 70,000 people; subsequent summers have produced significant but lower excess mortality as national heat health action plans have been implemented, hospital and care home protocols improved, and public awareness campaigns expanded. The most vulnerable populations — elderly people living alone, outdoor workers, people without air conditioning in urban heat islands — remain at elevated risk in any major heat event. Copernicus temperature forecasts suggesting sustained above-average temperatures across southern and central Europe through July and August represent a public health challenge as much as a fire management one.
The summer of 2026 will be managed better than the summer of 2003. It will also be warmer than the summer of 2003 in expected value terms — that is what two more decades of climate change mean for the European baseline. The preparedness investments of the past five years represent genuine improvement. They do not change the underlying trajectory that makes every European summer hotter, drier and more dangerous than the one before it.
