Northern Argentine Patagonia has been facing increasingly frequent and severe forest fires for several years. Events such as those that occurred in Cholila in 2015, El Bolsón in 2025, and Chubut in 2026 show that the climate regime in Patagonia has already changed. It is not a temporary fluctuation. Current meteorological conditions favor more severe and recurrent fires.
This context highlights the need to make visible and better understand the relationship between climate change and forest fires, as a fundamental step to design more effective prevention and response strategies for increasingly severe events.
In response to this scenario, Fundación Avina, through the BASE initiative (Building Approaches to fund local Solutions with climate Evidence), begins to work together with Fundación Alimentaris and local partners in northern Argentine Patagonia to strengthen the production and use of climate evidence to understand the conditions that favor forest fires.
A new climate context in Patagonia
The alliance seeks to develop and position climate evidence to better understand the relationship between forest fires in Argentine Patagonia and climate change. The objective is to generate information that contributes to improving prevention, response and recovery efforts, as well as to support climate financing mechanisms to address loss and damage.
In this context, a research project led by Santiago Hurtado and Marcos H. Easdale was carried out, with valuable contributions from territorial actors. The results are systematized in the Technical Report on Climate Change and Forest Fires in Northern Patagonia.
The analysis reveals clear signs of structural change: since the 2006–2007 period, precipitation has decreased by more than 20% in large areas in the mountain ranges, together with an increase in the average annual temperature between 0.2 and 0.7 °C, with summer peaks that reached up to 1.5 °C above the historical average in December and January. This evidence shows that prevention and response strategies cannot continue to be based on assumptions from 20 or 30 years ago. It is necessary to understand this new context.
These changes increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, which can now last up to eight consecutive days, and reinforced the role of wind (particularly in February) as a key factor in the spread of fire. As a result, the “danger window” of forest fires has expanded, with more than 15 additional days per year under conditions of high or extreme risk, according to the Fire Weather Index (FWI). The danger of fires increased structurally: more days of extreme risk, longer seasons and more intense events.
Climate evidence at the service of territories
The approach of the BASE initiative is grounded in a clear premise: climate evidence must be useful, understandable and actionable for those who are on the front line of the impacts of climate change, 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 to design more effective responses, anticipate risk scenarios and strengthen the resilience of ecosystems and of the communities that depend on them. This is precisely what the work of Fundación Avina, through BASE, and Fundación Alimentaris in Patagonia seeks to achieve: connecting knowledge, territory and action to generate evidence that supports more informed, fair and climate-aligned decisions.
About BASE
The main objective of BASE is to generate evidence through different financing mechanisms. We seek to demonstrate how the development of climate evidence can be simplified and serve as proof of concept for alternative approaches led by communities. In addition, we use these learnings to influence the broader climate financing ecosystem. Learn more about BASE at baseinitiative.net
