Firefighters battle a wildfire in Cebreros, Spain

Cesar MANSO/AFP via Getty Images

As unprecedented wildfires continue to burn in France and Spain, the blame game has also heated up. Right-wing opposition politicians have claimed both governments under-invested in water bombers because nearly half of their Canadair planes are out of operation. Officials have accused conservative-led regions like Madrid, where the forest fire service is only half-staffed, of undermining fire control.

But experts say the debates over firefighting are focusing on the symptoms rather than the disease. Instead, Europe must invest more in fire prevention such as prescribed burns, and even allow some wildfires to burn. That includes the UK, where a wildfire in Suffolk came within 5 kilometres of the Sizewell nuclear power station and another burned 25 square kilometres of moorland and forest in the Cairngorms, Scotland.

“You can double the number of planes; you can triple it. It will be very, very costly, and every single euro you put there is not a euro that is invested in prevention,” says Sebastien Lahaye at the French wildfire consultancy Warucene. “You will nevertheless have one fire or several fires that will escape and that will become this huge fire.”

The ingredients of a catastrophic wildfire are drought, heat and an accumulation of fuel, and this year has mixed in a generous portion of all three. A wet spring in parts of Europe increased vegetation, which then dried out in a widespread drought this summer. Now much of the continent is suffering through its fourth heatwave.

More than 4300 square kilometres have gone up in flames across the European Union, a pace that, if it continues, will break the record of 10,800 square kilometres burned last year. Record-sized wildfires near Bordeaux and Madrid forced one of the largest evacuations since the second world war.

In southern Europe, the average number of wildfires each year and the area burned has actually declined since 1981, according to a study this week by Raúl Cordero at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues. Mediterranean countries have warned the public against campfires and cigarettes in woodlands and got better at quickly extinguishing blazes by training firefighters and buying planes and helicopters.

But this crackdown has created a tinderbox. Shrubs and brush have proliferated, so those fires that do get out of hand are more likely to blow up into extreme megafires. This “suppression paradox” has been compounded by an exodus of people from rural areas to cities, leaving former farms and pastures overgrown. At the same time, more houses have sprung up in forests outside cities like Barcelona, raising the risk of wildfires, which most often are ignited by humans.

Now global warming is catching up with the improvements in wildfire suppression. Hot, dry and windy fire weather days have more than doubled across much of southern Europe, the study found.

“What’s occurring this year seemed to confirm our hypothesis… that we are about to enter a new era of large fires that didn’t exist in Europe because of the successful fire suppression and education,” says Cordero.

Rather than responding with more suppression, Europe must embrace the often uncomfortable task of making landscapes fire-resilient. Roughly speaking, 90 per cent of the fire budget in many countries goes towards fighting fires and 10 per cent towards preventing them, according Johann Goldammer at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.

“It should be the other way round, to invest 90 per cent of whatever is financially available in prevention and proactive measures, so that in the end, only 10 per cent would be needed for suppression,” he says.

The EU has been working to restore nature in 20 per cent of its land area by 2030 to combat the climate and biodiversity crises. But in many cases, woodlands need to be more intensively managed, including through sustainable logging, Goldammer argues.

Logging alone is not enough. The fire near Bordeaux raged through Europe’s largest human-made forest in Landes, 10,000 square kilometres of land that was once so swampy that shepherds walked on stilts. Napoleon III reclaimed the marshes by planting maritime pines, which are still harvested for paper and lumber.

Especially since a devastating 2022 fire there, landowners have built access roads, water ditches and fire breaks. But they also replanted the pine monoculture, a practice that raises fire risk. Similar monocultures of eucalyptus in Portugal have fuelled blazes like the Pedrógão Grande fire, which killed 66 people in 2017. While diversifying trees in the Landes may be difficult, the fire breaks at least need to be widened and increased, says Lahaye.

Even where forests don’t have fire breaks cleared to the bare ground, trees can be thinned and brush cleared to create fuel breaks. Re-establishing orchards, vineyards, pastures and agriculture can help create a “mosaic” of higher and lower fire fuel loads, rather than the uninterrupted tree cover that allowed the Bordeaux and Madrid fires to explode out of control.

Spanish regions have deployed herds of goats, sheep and cows to devour flammable brush. But in France, only 30 per cent of risky brush has been cleared due to conflicts between wildfire regulations and biodiversity regulations.

The most effective way to clear undergrowth is often through prescribed burns. Wildfires in the western US in 2020 were 16 per cent less severe in areas that had previously undergone prescribed burns, and they emitted 14 per cent less harmful particulate pollution as well.

But Europe is much more densely populated, and locals often see the technique as a threat. In some areas, regulations still often prevent it. While prescribed burning has been conducted along roads in the Landes, it is excluded from the timber plantations.

Sometimes it’s best not to fight wildfires at all, especially in winter, says Stefan Doerr at Swansea University, UK, although this is even more controversial.

“Firefighters from near Barcelona, they would tell you if there’s a fire in a forest and there are not particularly strong winds, let it burn because it will then not burn again for a long time under windier conditions,” says Doerr. “Everybody likes a nice pine forest… but it’s a bomb.”