Several European countries are having their worst wildfire year in more than a decade and worst than last year’s record wildfires that burnt over one million hectares, according to data from the EU's Global Wildfire Information System published this week.

France's cumulative burnt area through July 29 is running 4.1 times its 2012-2025 median for the same point in the season, Spain 3.5 times, Germany 3 times, Portugal 2.3 times and the UK 1.8 times. The Balkans, by contrast, have had a quieter year, with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia all below their historical median.

The World Meteorological Organization's Global Seasonal Climate Update for August-October 2026, issued in July, forecasts above-normal temperatures across most of the world alongside a strengthening super El Niño and a developing positive Indian Ocean Dipole - a combination that tends to amplify, rather than offset, extreme rainfall swings in both directions: worse flooding in some regions, worse drought in others.

And it’s going to get worse. Europe's wildfire season is one of the first visible symptoms of a pattern the WMO is only now confirming officially for the months ahead\ through to October.

Markets have not waited for the official confirmation. IntelliNews has tracked a string of El Nino-linked commodity and inflation stories through the second and third quarters of 2026, from Latin American central banks to Southeast Asian crop belts - evidence that the economic transmission channel identified by the WMO's forecast is already live, not merely forecast.

A hotter, more extreme world for three months

The WMO's probabilistic model, built from a multi-model ensemble, shows above-normal temperature probability across almost the entire globe for August-October, with the strongest confidence in the tropics and mid-latitudes. Changes in rainfall patterns is going to make the biggest difference. The same forecast shows a mixed but pronounced pattern of above-normal rainfall probability across parts of South Asia and the tropical Pacific, and below-normal probability across swathes of southern Africa, parts of South America and the Mediterranean basin – a divergence that turns a single global weather pattern into a series of very different regional economic stories.

Already pricing in

Swiss bank UBS warned in mid-July that a strong El Nino threatens to reignite inflation and delay interest rate cuts across Latin America, singling out Colombia as most exposed given its high inflation and weak fiscal position, with Brazil and Peru also flagged and Venezuela's hydropower-dependent grid seen as vulnerable to drought. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the probability of the current episode being powerful at 63%, with effects expected to persist into early 2027.

The pattern has already hit agricultural commodities further east. In June that Malaysia issued a sovereign warning over crop damage risk to its palm oil plantations even as near-term prices fell on unrelated demand weakness - agricultural economists note the biological lag between an El Nino heatwave and reduced fresh fruit bunch extraction typically runs several months, meaning any supply hit shows up closer to early 2027. Rice told a faster-moving version of the same story: Vietnam's rice export price for 5% broken rice rose to $412 a tonne in May on El Nino-linked drought fears across India, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia, with the UN's FAO Rice Price Index up 2.7% on the month.

Burning in Europe

Europe's wildfire numbers are the clearest evidence yet that this year's pattern is not merely a forecasting exercise. The divergence within Europe itself - a very bad year in France, Spain, Germany, Portugal and the UK against a calmer one in the Balkans - illustrates the WMO's own point about the Mediterranean basin sitting in the below-normal rainfall probability band, a dry bias that raises fire risk independent of any single heatwave.

WMO Global Seasonal Climate Update: temperature and rainfall outlook for August-October 2026. Source: World Meteorological Organization.

Cumulative burnt area, 2026 season to July 29, relative to each country's 2012-2025 median. Source: Global Wildfire Information System.

None of this guarantees a repeat performance for the rest of the WMO's three-month window - seasonal probabilistic forecasts describe likelihoods, not certainties, and the report itself stresses that its colours represent forecast probability rather than magnitude. But taken together with the commodity moves already logged this quarter, the wildfire data is the strongest sign yet that 2026's El Nino is behaving as advertised rather than fading, as some earlier and weaker episodes have done.