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Climate

45 years of Mediterranean wildfires

Burned area in the five Mediterranean countries EFFIS has tracked continuously since 1980, stacked year by year. Ordinary summers have been shrinking since the 1980s; the worst years have not — 1985 and 2017 still stand almost level. Click a country to pull its years forward.

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Reporting coverage grows across the record — 5 countries filed in 1980, 29 in 2024. The added band is aggregate reporting, not fire arriving somewhere new.

Data & source

Data: EFFIS — European Forest Fire Information System (Copernicus Emergency Management Service / JRC), European Fire Database annual burnt-area report, 1980–2024 · © European Union, JRC open data policy (CC BY 4.0) · fetched —.

Scope and gaps, plainly: these are reported burnt-area totals, compiled by national fire services and harmonised by EFFIS — not a satellite census. Only Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece have filed without a break since 1980; every other country joins the database later, which is why they are aggregated into one band rather than given their own. Reporting practice has changed over forty-five years, so decade-to-decade comparison carries real uncertainty — the step line is a summary of what was reported, not a measured trend. The record ends with the last completed season; there is no partial current year here.