Has climate change worsened Chile's wildfires? Not this time, researchers say.

Climate change may not have made the deadly wildfires that ravaged part of Chile more likely in early February, according to a group of climate scientists and meteorologists who specialize in the rapid analysis of weather-related disasters.

Central Chile has been plagued by prolonged drought for more than a decade. In addition to these dry conditions, the region experienced an intense heat wave in early February, increasing the risk of forest fires.

According to the new analysis According to the group World Weather Attribution, the probability of these conditions, specific to the coastal area of ​​Chile where the fires occurred, is now about 3 percent in any given year. That risk is not significantly greater than before human-induced climate change.

The fires affected the area around the coastal town of Viña del Mar. More than 130 people died in the fires, which destroyed more than 7,000 homes and burned more than 30,000 hectares. People living in poorer, informal settlements suffered the most damage.

The researchers also found no significant influence from El Niño, the natural climate pattern that warms the eastern Pacific Ocean on a cyclical basis, sometimes for several months and sometimes for a few years. The Pacific Ocean has been in El Niño formation since June.

“In this specific region, in these specific fire conditions, we found that neither climate change nor El Niño played a significant role,” Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and author of the study, said during a briefing for reporters. on Wednesday.

However, the research shows that if the planet were to warm more than two degrees Celsius above average pre-industrial temperatures, the likelihood of similar fire conditions would increase. The planet has currently warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Other recent research has found that, more broadly, both El Niño and climate change in central Chile have contributed to the increasingly intense wildfires of recent years. According to a separate study published this yearThe past decade has seen six of the nation's seven most devastating fire seasons, with nearly three times as much land burned in the 2014-2023 period as in the 1981-2010 period.

Raúl Cordero, the lead author of this study, said in an interview that he disagreed with World Weather Attribution's finding that El Niño did not play a significant role.

“El Niño occurs a few thousand kilometers away from this specific location,” a short distance on a planetary scale, he noted.

Chilean authorities know to expect higher temperatures and a greater risk of wildfires during El Niño summers, and officials have deployed additional firefighting resources to the central part of the country months in advance. However, extreme conditions in early February made the fires “unstoppable,” said Dr. Cordero, a climate scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Santiago in Chile.

The complication in studying the area around Viña del Mar is that it is meteorologically unique: temperatures on the coast of Chile are influenced by global warming and also by El Niño and by a separate cooling effect of the Pacific Ocean. Climate change has led to stronger winds there, which paradoxically causes more cold water to flow from deeper in the ocean to the surface and cool the coast.

World Weather Attribution uses climate models to compare the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather now with similar events on a simulated Earth before climate change. Due to the complexity of this region, only five climate models were able to accurately represent the local weather. Normally, the group's studies would involve between 20 and 70 different models, said Dr. Otto.

Climate change is affecting this region, the researchers explained, causing multiple competing effects.

“At 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming, this complex pattern of trends results in neither a decrease nor an increase in the surface weather events that cause forest fires,” said Tomás Carrasco Escaff, a climate researcher at the University of Chile and another author of the study. the briefing on Wednesday.

Factors other than weather, such as land use and management, also play an important role and could increase the likelihood of similar wildfires, the researchers said. Plantations of single-species flammable pine and eucalyptus trees have replaced native, more fire-resistant ecosystems in many parts of Chile, including around Viña del Mar.