Senande Rivera, MartínInsua Costa, DamiánMíguez Macho, Gonzalo2025-04-232025-04-232025Senande-Rivera, M., Insua-Costa, D. & Miguez-Macho, G. Climate change aggravated wildfire behaviour in the Iberian Peninsula in recent years. npj Clim Atmos Sci 8, 19 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-025-00906-3https://hdl.handle.net/10347/40988Climate change is considered to affect wildfire spread both by increasing fuel dryness and by altering vegetation mass and structure. However, the direct effect of global warming on wildfires is hard to quantify due to the multiple non-climatic factors involved in their ignition and spread. By combining wildfire observations with the latest generation of climate models, here we show that more than half of the large wildfires (area>500 ha) occurring in the Iberian Peninsula between 2001 and 2021 present a significant increase in the rate of spread with respect to what it would have been in the pre-industrial period, attributable to global warming. The average acceleration of the rate of spread due to increased fuel dryness is between 2.0% and 8.3%, whereas the influence of enhanced vegetation growth since the pre-industrial period could potentially be even higher than the direct impact of temperature increase in fuel conditions.eng© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/journal article10.1038/s41612-025-00906-32397-3722open access