Carbon emissions: record highs in Europe due to summer fires

The year is far from over, but since January, forest fires in Europe have released 12.9 megatons of carbon. A record, the European Copernicus service warned on Thursday, September 18: "Total annual carbon emissions estimated for the European Union and the United Kingdom have been, since the end of August and with the fire season still active, the highest" ever recorded.

Previous annual records were 11.4 megatons of carbon, both in 2003 and 2017. This figure was surpassed this year as fires have ravaged more than a million hectares in the European Union since January.

The year was marked by "intense forest fire activity in Europe," particularly on the Iberian Peninsula in mid-August, the institute said in its press release. In Spain alone, these fires caused four deaths and burned more than 350,000 hectares, and in terms of carbon, "total emissions in the region, below average until the beginning of August, changed radically in the space of just one week."

Emissions from the fires in Spain and Portugal alone account for about three-quarters of the European total.

But the phenomenon extends beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Forests in Turkey, Cyprus, and some Balkan countries were also ravaged by flames this summer. By the end of July, Copernicus had recorded some of the highest levels of carbon emissions from fires in Greece and Turkey since measurements began 23 years ago.

At the same time, the United Kingdom was already breaking its annual emissions record. In Serbia and Albania, emissions were the second highest, behind those of 2007. The European emissions record was also accentuated by the plumes of smoke that crossed the Atlantic from Canada, due to the "megafires" that the country suffered during the summer and until September.

In addition to the fires, the summer of 2025 was also marked in Europe by "unusually frequent and intense" episodes of Saharan dust transport, Copernicus notes. Flows from the Mediterranean to southern Europe and to the American continent, across the Atlantic.

Finally, this summer's heat waves have caused ozone concentrations to rise above regulatory levels across most of Europe. These are all events and dynamics whose intensification and frequency are linked to global warming, itself caused by human activity.