Future climate change impact on wildfire danger over the Mediterranean: the case of GreeceFuture climate change impact on wildfire danger over the Mediterranean: the case of Greece Επιστολή Letter 2024-03-012022enRecent studies have shown that temperature and precipitation in the Mediterranean are expected to change, contributing to longer and more intense summer droughts that even extend out of season. In connection to this, the frequency of forest fire occurrence and intensity will likely increase. In the present study, the changes in future fire danger conditions are assessed for the different regions of Greece using the Canadian fire weather index (FWI). Gridded future climate output as estimated from three regional climate models from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment are utilized. We use three representative concentration pathways (RCPs) consisting of an optimistic emissions scenario where emissions peak and decline beyond 2020 (RCP2.6), a middle-of-the-road scenario (RCP4.5) and a pessimistic scenario, in terms of mitigation where emissions continue to rise throughout the century (RCP8.5). Based on established critical fire FWI threshold values for Greece, the future change in days with critical fire danger were calculated for different areas of Greece domains. The results show that fire danger is expected to progressively increase in the future especially in the high-end climate change scenario with southern and eastern regions of Greece expected to have up to 40 additional days of high fire danger relative to the late 20th century, on average. Crete, the Aegean Islands, the Attica region, as well as parts of Peloponnese are predicted to experience a stronger increase in fire danger.This project is supported by the project/program 'National Νetwork on Climate Change and its Impacts—Climpact' financed by the Public Investment Program of Greece and based on the results from FWI simulations provided by Copernicus Climate Change Service.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Environmental Research Letters174Rovithakis_et_al_Environ. Res. Lett._17(4)_2022.pdfChania [Greece]Library of TUC2024-03-01application/pdf23.9 MBfree Rovithakis Anastasios Ροβιθακης Αναστασιος Grillakis Emmanouil Γρυλλακης Εμμανουηλ Seiradakis Konstantinos Σειραδακης Κωνσταντινος Giannakopoulos Christos Karali Anna Field Robert Lazaridis Michail Λαζαριδης Μιχαηλ Voulgarakis Apostolos Βουλγαρακης Αποστολος IOP Publishing Fire danger Fire weather index EURO-CORDEX Wildfires