We found that the observed fire weather conditions were the most extreme in the 1979-2021 autumn record. These conditions have become almost twice as likely as a result of climate change.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
assessments. These gave us many years of data to provide a robust risk estimate. This is important because our study area was the smallest over which a wildfire event attribution has been done. Over small domains, local variability makes climate change signals harder to detect. The more data you have, the better the chance of picking up signals.index of fire weather
over Cape Town on 18 April 2021. We compared this with a past climate, before human-driven warming, to see how often the models output FWI values for Cape Town in autumn that are at least as extreme. Our results strongly suggest that the weather conditions under which extreme Cape Town wildfires can occur are happening ever more frequently in this area in a warming world. This adds to a