CLIMATE change is to blame for the extreme weather that contributed to this week’s devastating wildfires in Spain and France and has spiked southern Europe’s burning over the past eight years, two new studies concluded on Thursday.

Human-caused climate change made the hot and dry conditions responsible for Spain’s record-sized inferno 20 times more likely to happen, and it doubled the chances of extreme fire conditions for the blazes in France, scientists at World Weather Attribution calculated in a rapid analysis conducted while fires were still burning.

Warming in the past 26 years has tripled the odds of the severe fire risk conditions in Spain and increased the chances in France by 40 per cent, the same report found.

At the same time, researchers published a separate study on Thursday that found the number of days that southern Europe’s weather reached extreme fire-prone levels has more than doubled compared to decades ago.

Friederike Otto, an Imperial College of London climate scientist who co-ordinates World Weather Attribution, said: “The change in these fire weather conditions in Spain is really extremely strong and is, I think, one of the largest changes that I’ve seen.”

Spain is having its hottest summer on record, after an incredibly wet January that allowed plants to grow before a severe drought hit, a combination that increased wildfire fuel, the report said.

Thursday’s other study, in the journal Scientific Reports, finds that there were about 10 extreme fire weather days a year in southern Europe in earlier decades, but it is now up to around 25 a year, said study author Raul Cordero, a climate scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

“It doesn’t matter how many resources or how much money you have, you just cannot stop the propagation of a fire when the weather is so extreme,” Mr Cordero said.