Southern Europe is experiencing an unprecedented wildfire season in 2025, driven by the combined effects of climate change, prolonged heatwaves and anthropogenic pressures. According to the Joint Research Centre (JRC), by mid-August 2025 more than 439,000 hectares had burned across the European Union since the beginning of the year, reflecting an exceptional and fast-evolving wildfire season. In particular, Spain reports its worst wildfire year in decades, with extreme fires during August burning hundreds of thousands of hectares.
Beyond immediate losses of vegetation and biodiversity, and the well-documented impacts on air and water quality, recent events have underscored the high probability that burned catchments and hillslopes will produce cascading geohydrological hazards in the weeks to years following wildfire. Post-fire responses such as rockfalls, debris flows and accelerated erosion can be triggered even by moderate rainfall, substantially increasing risk to people, structures and infrastructures.
Although significant progress has been made in this field, much remains to be done to understand the geohydrological hazards associated with extreme fires. Bridging this gap requires integrated approaches that combine rapid field assessments, characterization, inventories, modelling, and management strategies to enable timely mitigation and adaptation.
This session invites contributions that address these challenges by presenting new field evidence, monitoring techniques (including remote sensing and in-situ methods), modelling advances for post-fire slope instability and sediment connectivity, and case studies with lessons learned that can use as examples for future wildfires.