Northern Argentine Patagonia has been experiencing increasingly frequent and severe wildfires for several years. Events such as those that occurred in Cholila in 2015, El Bolsón in 2025, and Chubut in 2026 show that these are not isolated incidents, but rather the manifestation of a deeper process linked to changes in the region’s climatic conditions.

This highlights the need to make visible and better understand the link between climate change and wildfires, as a key step toward designing more effective strategies for prevention, response, and recovery in the face of increasingly severe fire events.

In response to this scenario, the BASE Initiative (Building Approaches to fund local Solutions with climate Evidence), coordinated by Fundación Avina, began working together with Fundación Alimentaris and local partners in northern Argentine Patagonia. The aim is to strengthen the production and use of climate evidence to better understand how the conditions that favor wildfires are changing, and to support decision-making related to prevention, response, and recovery.

A new climate context in Patagonia

The alliance seeks to develop and position climate evidence to better understand the relationship between wildfires in an area of Argentine Patagonia and climate change. The goal is to generate information that contributes to improving prevention, response, and recovery efforts, while also helping to inform climate finance mechanisms to address loss and damage.

Within this framework, a research study led by Dr. Santiago Hurtado and Dr. Marcos H. Easdale was carried out, with valuable contributions from territorial actors. Its results are compiled in the Technical Report “Climate change and wildfires in Northern Patagonia, Argentina: Evidence of a new climate regime increasing wildfire risk.”

You can download the full technical report and the public-facing executive summary (both in Spanish).

The analysis reveals clear signs of structural change: since the 2006–2007 period, precipitation has decreased by more than 20% across large cordilleran areas, alongside an increase in average annual temperature of between 0.2 and 0.7 °C, with summer peaks reaching up to 1.5 °C above the historical average in December and January.

These changes have increased the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, which can now last up to eight consecutive days, and have reinforced the role of wind—particularly in February—as a key factor in fire spread. As a result, the wildfire “danger window” has expanded, with more than 15 additional days per year under high or extreme risk conditions, according to the Fire Weather Index (FWI).

Climate evidence in service of territories

BASE’s approach is grounded in a clear premise: climate evidence must be useful, understandable, and actionable for those on the front lines of climate change impacts, as well as for decision-makers. In Patagonia, this means recognizing that the climate regime has already changed and that traditional fire management strategies need to be adapted.

Understanding this new reality is an essential step toward designing more effective responses, anticipating risk scenarios, and strengthening the resilience of ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

This is precisely what the work of BASE and Fundación Alimentaris in Patagonia seeks to achieve: connecting knowledge, territory, and action to generate evidence that supports more informed, just, and climate-aligned decisions.

Photo: @incendiosforestalesargentina