Europe’s wildfire wake-up call: why climate risk isn’t the same everywhere

Wildfires are no longer “local incidents”. They are systemic physical and financial risks. In summer 2025, Europe recorded its most destructive wildfire season (2) since European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) (3) records began in 2006. 

The implication for investors and operators is straightforward: you cannot manage what you only measure “on average”. Decision-makers need high resolution tools that capture risk at assets, corridors and sites level—not countries. Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC Venture), offers tools, including a highly innovative interactive online map (1) that displays various climate assessments, including wildfire risks, presented here and detailed further in a recent long article (4).

A « Pyrocene » season, but with highly uneven impacts

By early September 2025, nearly 1 million hectares had burned in Europe across 1,923+ fires – over four times the area reported at the same point the year before. Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal faced evacuations, infrastructure damage and rising economic costs. Beyond the headline figures, the season exposed a persistent blind spot in climate-risk debates: hazards are spatially patchy, yet decisions on pricing, insurance, capex and maintenance are taken at the asset level.
 

This gap is widening in what many now call a “new age of fire” – driven not only by hotter, drier conditions, but also by human ignition, vegetation overgrowth, land-use change and fossil-fuel combustion. Fire risk is therefore not just a climate signal; it is shaped by how and where we build, operate and manage land.

Southern Europe illustrates the point. Greece and Turkey experienced extremely high values of the Fire Weather Index (FWI), a widely used indicator combining temperature, humidity, wind speed, and rainfall to quantify. In Greece, temperatures reached 42.4°C, while strong winds complicated containment efforts; by mid-August, around 45,000 hectares had burned, according to the National Observatory of Athens.

Attribution science reinforces the signal: human-driven climate change made fire-prone conditions in Greece and Turkey about ten times more likely (5). Climate change extends fire seasons, increases fuel dryness, and amplifies fire spread, undermining forests’ role as carbon sinks. But this does not mean risk rises uniformly everywhere. It concentrates, moves, and can jump across critical networks (roads, power lines, water systems) in ways that national averages simply cannot represent.

From satellite views to decision – useful indicators

Wildfire monitoring is now data-rich and increasingly near real time. A key metric is Fire Radiative Power (FRP): the higher the FRP, the higher the estimated emissions, as it reflects the fire’s heat output and the rate of fuel consumption. 

In practice, decision-makers combine the FWI used to forecast meteorological fire risk (as mentioned above), Copernicus services such as European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) (3), which track fires across the EU and neighbouring countries, and satellite-based platforms that track where fires start, how far they spread and how intense they become.

These tools are essential, but they do not fully answer the question investors and operators care about most: not only “where is the hazard?”, but “what is the financial exposure of this specific asset, at this horizon?”

This is the gap addressed by the Scientific Climate Ratings’ methodology, which translates high-resolution physical risk signals into comparable, asset-level metrics designed for finance and infrastructure decisions. To move in this direction, the researchers of this EDHEC venture have put together their latest findings in an online tool available to both professionals and citizens: https://scientificratings.com/map/. 

Why “high resolution” changes the risk story

This is where the “global average vs local insights” lesson becomes actionable for policymakers. Climate economics and wildfire risk analysis are moving toward far finer spatial detail, enabled by daily (sometimes hourly) climate data at resolutions down to 100m x 100m - often requiring high-performance computing to process terabyte-scale datasets. 

As Rémy Estran-Fraioli, CEO of Scientific Climate Ratings put it in a recent EDHEC Vox interview: “It’s no longer enough to say “airports are vulnerable” or “ports are at risk”: the specifics depend on which asset, its location, and the conditions it faces. That’s why asset-level, science-based analysis is crucial for informed decision-making.”

The benefit is not marginal: bottom-up aggregation can yield more severe and more realistic estimates than coarse approaches, while producing insights that are usable for policy, business and investment. Even at the macro level, moving from country averages to sub-national regions can raise aggregated damage estimates because it finally captures within-country heterogeneity. In short, resolution is not a “nice to have”: it changes the risk narrative.

Turning wildfire hazard into asset-level ratings

Scientific Climate Ratings apply this logic directly to wildfire risk by assessing exposure at 2035 and 2050 horizons and estimating potential damage for each individual asset. The approach is decision-orientated: it links hazard information to asset-level financial variables (such as asset value) and uses inputs including monthly burned-area data and FWI projected in future climates to build probability maps. 

This methodology leverages high-resolution data (7), such as NASA’s global monthly burnt-area records (2001–2024) and detailed asset boundaries, to create accurate, localised risk assessments. It also treats geometry as material: rather than generic radius buffers, it relies on detailed asset boundaries – often the difference between underestimating exposure and sizing it correctly.

One illustration is telling: for the SJC Bioenergia Sugar & Ethanol plant in Brazil, with a physical value at risk of USD121 million, a radius-based approach underestimates wildfire value-at-risk by USD8 million compared with boundary-based estimates of USD129 million. A relatively small percentage difference, yet a seven-figure understatement in absolute terms for a single asset. To ensure outputs are readable and comparable, results are translated: Climate Exposure Ratings (CER) grade assets from A (lowest risk) to G (highest risk). 

For example, the Astur-Leonesa Toll Road (AP-66) in Spain is rated F, signaling higher wildfire exposure for a critical transport corridor. Its disruption would generate cascading effects across transport networks and the wider economy, far beyond the asset’s own repair costs – making these infrastructure ratings particularly valuable for investors, operators, public authorities, and users.

Europe’s 2025 season is a reminder that physical risk is operational risk - and therefore financial risk. The practical shift is from headline narratives to asset-level action: prioritising fuel and vegetation management around critical sites, stress-testing continuity plans for fire-driven power and water disruptions, embedding wildfire exposure into capex choices (hardening, redundancy, access), and aligning insurance, maintenance and emergency response with forward-looking exposure ratings.

As wildfire risk accelerates and spreads, the edge comes not only from better forecasting, but from better geolocalisation. Resilience requires granular, science-based tools - like those offered by Scientific Climate Ratings – to turn systemic hazards into actionable, asset-specific strategies. Indeed, Resilience is built in the details, not in global averages.

References

(1) On-demand ratings map, full report and data - see https://scientificratings.com/map/

(2) Europe's Wildfires Have Burned the Most Land in Nearly 20 Years. Bloomberg, August 2025 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-19/europe-s-wildfires-have-burned-the-most-land-in-nearly-20-years

(3) See European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) - https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/

(4) Europe’s “Pyrocene Era”: Assessing Wildfire Risk in a Changing Climate. Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC Venture), Sept. 2025 - https://scientificratings.com/2025/09/15/europes-pyrocene-era-assessing-wildfire-risk-in-a-changing-climate/

(5) Weather conditions leading to deadly wildfires in Türkiye, Cyprus and Greece made 10 times more likely due to climate change. World Weather Attribution, August 2025 - https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/weather-conditions-leading-to-deadly-wildfires-in-turkiye-cyprus-and-greece-made-10-times-more-likely-due-to-climate-change/

(6) Rémy Estran-Fraioli - Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC Venture): “After months of preparation, at a crucial time, we are embarking on an intense journey with knowledge and tools that are unique in the sector". EDHEC Vox, June 2025 - https://www.edhec.edu/en/research-and-faculty/edhec-vox/remy-estran-fraioli-scientific-climate-ratings-edhec-venture-after-preparation-embark-journey-unique-knowledge-tools

(7) From global average to local insights: Harnessing high-resolution data for climate risk assessment and resilience to physical shocks. EDHEC Climate Institute, March 2025 - https://climateinstitute.edhec.edu/news/global-average-local-insights-harnessing-high-resolution-data-climate-risk-assessment-and

See also Before They Materialise: Global Physical Risk Hotspots - Grounding EDHEC-CLIRMAP in Narratives and Literature. EDHEC Climate Institute, Dec. 2025 - https://climateinstitute.edhec.edu/news/they-materialise-global-physical-risk-hotspots-grounding-edhec-clirmap-narratives-and

Photo by Marek Piwnicki via Unsplash