Wildfire season arrives again: Is Europe ready this time?

After Europe suffered its worst wildfire season ever last year, Brussels has given a boost to support for countries preparing for future blazes, but weak cross-border coordination and gaps in prevention still risk leaving the bloc exposed.

Last time around, the destruction began unusually early, in March, highlighting the growing impact of climate change. Europe went on to experience its hottest summer on record, and more than a million hectares of woodland, fields and moors went up in flames – an area roughly the size of Cyprus – nearly half of it on the Iberian Peninsula.

Farmland was badly affected by the blazes but, importantly, also served as a firebreak .

Europe on fire

This March, the European Commission launched a wildfire prevention and response strategy . The following month completed a trio of the hottest mean temperatures ever recorded for April, with southern Europe as much as 4°C above the 1991–2020 average.

“Europe must be ready before the first fire starts,” European Commission Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu said while launching the latest wildfire preparedness drive.

Brussels to the RescEU

Since last summer, the EU has strengthened its Civil Protection Mechanism (ECPM), which coordinates the deployment of aircraft, firefighters, and the sharing of satellite data between EU countries and partners. More than 700 firefighters will be on standby across Europe, up from fewer than 200 five years ago.

And they’ve already been called into action. Last month, the Netherlands suffered wildfires, after an unusually dry spell, forcing them to call on the ECPM for the first time ever . Shortly afterwards, the Czech Republic requested its help to tackle a blaze in a national park in Bohemia.

Around the same time, the EU executive opened a new firefighting hub in Cyprus, equipped with six aircraft to support joint training and regional cooperation.

The Commission plans to expand Europe’s firefighting fleet – part of a pool of common emergency response resources dubbed ‘RescEU’ – with 12 new firefighting planes and three helicopters by 2028. This summer, 18 airplanes and 4 helicopters have already been put on standby.

At a recent meeting with EU farm ministers, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen said EU funding, including through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), could be used to help manage wildfires.

He noted that about €1 billion is currently allocated. Countries including Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain have called for a stronger CAP with a dedicated rural budget to improve future wildfire preparedness.

Difficult cooperation

Despite moves at the EU level, tackling outbreaks of wildfire remains a largely national matter, Renew MEP Grégory Allione told Euractiv.

The EU’s role is more “one of support, reinforcement, and a capacity for mutual assistance and solidarity”, explained the liberal lawmaker, himself a former firefighter and head of the French firefighters’ federation.

And despite the best intentions of policy makers in Brussels, interoperability remains a key challenge when it comes to pooling resources. “Can a French fire department hose coupling be connected to a German, Belgian, Italian or Greek one? Today, the answer is no,” Allione said.

He recalled visiting a fire station in Greece where a collection of hose couplings from different European countries was displayed on a wall, showing how firefighters are often forced to improvise to connect hoses to local water supplies.

Joint operations are further complicated as firefighters in different countries use different techniques to tackle blazes, Allione added. One solution would be to develop shared training materials and hold more joint exercises, a kind of “civil protection Erasmus”, he said, referring to the EU’s student exchange scheme.

Prevention in practice

The best way to tackle the growing threat from wildfires is to stop them from starting in the first place. To that end, the EU executive is also investing in prevention through its European Climate Adaptation Mission, launched in 2021.

“Over nearly a decade, the Commission has invested around €600 million in nature-based solutions,” said Philippe Tulkens, deputy head of the mission.

But forest owners warn that implementation remains difficult because of differing national rules. In France, for example, new regulations require vegetation to be cleared in certain fire-prone areas around roads and homes.

However, Tammouz Eñaut Helou, secretary-general of the French forest owners’ association UCFF, said uncertainty over who is responsible for what make enforcement difficult. “We are not ready,” he said of the coming wildfire season.

Helou also pointed to conflicting requirements linked to biodiversity protection. “When you clear vegetation, you may disturb wild birds’ nests and risk being fined,” he said. Some environmentalists, however, accuse forest owners are using the crisis for their own ends.

“It seems they’re using the emergency of the fires as a means of loosening Europe’s environmental regulations to make it easier to extract timber,” said campaigner Siim Kuresoo of the forest protection group Fern.

A lack of public awareness and acceptance of the need to act is also hindering prevention work, according to Françoise Matheron, former mayor of Saint-Bauzille-de-Montmel in southern France, a highly fire-prone area.

“People don’t want a mayor who tells them life is going to change, that it will get hotter, and that there will be fires,” - Françoise Matheron

She partly blames her recent defeat in local elections on the strong stance she took on vegetation clearance. “People want to be told that nothing needs to change,” Matheron said.

Building back better

The challenge doesn’t end once a forest has burned down. Critics argue that the reforestation of scorched earth is often rushed and poorly adapted to local conditions. In Andalusia, southern Spain, the association Semillistas advocates a different approach.

“Authorities have a short-term view on reforestation,” says advocacy manager Óliver Ruiz Garrido. “They want the fastest-growing trees to green the landscape again before they leave office.”

This, Garrido argues, encourages the use of greenhouse-grown trees that are poorly suited to mountainous terrain and require substantial irrigation.

The common practice of planting in straight lines can also worsen future fire spread. “If one pine tree catches fire, the flames can spread for 50 kilometres in minutes. It’s absurd,” he said. And the choice of species is a key concern.

“For years, forests were replanted with pine trees, which are highly pyrophilic and not native to the region,” Garrido continued. “You cannot expect to create a German forest in the middle of Andalusia.”

Semillistas instead promotes locally adapted species and natural treatments to strengthen seeds before planting.

Fern campaigner Kuresoo, an Estonian based in Brussels, has lobbied European policymakers to adopt this approach. He argues that EU subsidies should not be used to plant non-native trees in fire-prone regions, and steered instead towards creating natural, mixed-species woodland.

“This is a task where EU policy has a lot of leverage,” Kuresoo said.