Wildfires and heatwaves have made headlines causing more than €3 billion in damages in Europe this summer. Major fires in France and Spain forced more than 350,000 people to evacuate, capturing global attention and mirroring a severe wildfire season already underway across the Atlantic in the United States and Canada.
Smoke-filled skies, evacuations, and lengthy heatwaves raised concern on both continents. Global coverage was quick to connect these events with rising temperatures and climate change, with headlines like “Extremely scary findings’ show climate crisis is supercharging Europe’s wildfire weather” and “Climate extremes fuel explosive wildfires in Canada and the U.S.”
Climate change is worsening an important driver of wildfire: fire weather. But fire weather is not synonymous with wildfire outcomes. Human land use decisions, accumulating fuel loads, and fire suppression policies play a huge role in transforming how easily fire spreads across the landscape.
Regional land-use histories across Europe illustrate how recent wildfire disasters emerged from specific ecologies, management decisions, and local policy precedent. Understanding the differences in these local drivers and how they interact with global climate change is necessary to better predict, mitigate, and adapt to wildfire risk.
Why climate seems like a good explanation for severe wildfires
Climate attribution studies show that anthropogenic warming is making fire-conducive weather more likely or more severe. Heat waves can cause vegetation to dry out. Changes in temperature, drought, and precipitation affect fuel moisture, enabling fire to spread more rapidly. In parts of Europe, climate change is also lengthening the period during which extreme fire weather can occur. Observers of the 2026 wildfire season point to burned area in countries like France and Spain being well above the median for this point of the year as evidence of the climate connection.
It’s true that climate conditions, like temperatures, humidity, wind, and precipitation patterns, influence how readily fuels burn. But human activity and land management patterns strongly influence what fuels are available to burn, their structure, and continuity across the landscape. The combination of these factors determines how a fire spreads and how intensely it burns.
At the global scale, satellite records have shown a decline in burned area from wildfires despite rising temperatures. The decline is mainly driven by changes in land-use at the landscape scale, largely due to agricultural expansion and intensification in Africa. The global trend says little about the trajectory of wildfire risk in any particular European country. Wildfire risk is not declining everywhere. But, it does illustrate the broader point that human activity and land management decisions exert enough influence to complicate the narrative that climate change will always lead to a net increase in wildfire activity.
Land conversion and planted forests near Bordeaux
The record fires seen across Mediterranean Europe this summer, especially in Bordeaux, demonstrate how human land-use decisions have the exact opposite effect, instead exacerbating fire risk.
Bordeaux sits on the northern edge of one of France’s largest forest zones, called the Landes de Gascogne. The landscape is especially prone to wildfire today in part due to a nineteenth-century land transformation and the continued replanting of maritime-pine trees.
Before the nineteenth-century transformation, much of the Landes was wetland, peat bog, and open moorland. Under Napoleon III, a 1857 law directed the development of large swaths of the area. The wetlands were drained and what was a heterogeneous open landscape was replaced with far more continuous forest cover. The land conversion created what is still one of Europe’s largest planted forests with more than one million hectares (2.5 million acres) made up primarily of maritime-pine grown for timber, pulp, and resin. Despite the economic boon, the increased forest continuity came at a cost. As one commenter described, “when you plant millions of the same, fire-adapted tree in even-aged stands, at high density, across a nearly unbroken block of landscape, you’re building a regional-scale fire conveyor belt.”
The vulnerability of this landscape predates modern warming trends. A catastrophic fire in 1949 near Cestas burned roughly 50,000 hectares in a matter of days killing 82 people and remains the deadliest wildfire in French history. Fires burned a record 130,000 hectares over the course of that year’s fire season.
Even more recent fire seasons demonstrate that the same fuel-continuity pattern built by centuries of dense, even-aged pine plantation continues to drive both burned area and evacuation scale. In the summer of 2022, a series of fires near Landiras and La Teste-de-Buch spread through the same forest, burning more than 30,000 hectares. Four years later, fires beginning near Saumos this summer burned 42,000 hectares within five days and forced roughly 220,000 evacuations.
The extraordinary 2026 fire reflects how extreme fire weather helped create conditions for rapid spread on a vast, highly connected forest shaped by more than a century of land-use decisions.
Agricultural retreat transformed Europe’s fire landscape
Zooming out from France, Europe’s forests are growing. Forest area has increased by about 11% since 1990. Total cropland and grassland declined over the same period. The expansion is driven in part by intentional afforestation and in areas experiencing rural depopulation, abandoned agricultural land has undergone natural forest regeneration.
Especially in many parts of Mediterranean Europe, agricultural and pastoral abandonment is contributing to the expansion of forests, shrublands, and other woody vegetation. One ecological consequence of this is a build up of fuels across formerly managed landscapes. A grazed pasture, orchard, or cultivated field can interrupt the continuity of woody vegetation. Once abandoned, shrubs and young trees may recolonize, eventually connecting areas that were previously separated.
When farmland abandonment leads to a more homogenous landscape, fuel buildup and continuity increases. Landscape-fire simulations suggest that greater abandonment in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes can cause wildfires to become larger, more intense, and more likely to spread. A recent modeling study found that in eastern Spain, replacing active agriculture with abandoned vegetation tripled potential fire size and quadrupled exposure of human infrastructure. Conversely, population shifts from rural to urban areas can reduce the chances of fire ignitions caused by humans.
The balance of these competing forces has changed over time, varying by season and region. For example, from 1985 to 2011, despite increases in forested area, the total area burned annually across Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece declined by just over 300,000 hectares. The annual number of fires also declined overall.
Total burned area reflects the net effect of competing forces, not climate or fuel conditions alone. Land abandonment can increase underlying fire hazard by increasing fuel quantity and continuity, while investments in mitigating the likelihood of a fire starting or spreading (prevention) and quickly quelling fires once started (suppression) simultaneously reduce the amount of land that actually burns. In Mediterranean France, for example, fire size and burned area fell sharply after a strengthened suppression policy took effect in the mid-1990s—even as fuel accumulation and fire-weather hazard increased. Comparing the two decades before and after the suppression policy went into effect found that the number of fires fell about 25 percent and total burned area fell by 60 percent.
Reducing area burned through suppression alone often contributes to a ‘firefighting trap’: when allocating the vast majority of wildfire management resources to fire suppression paradoxically leads to fuel accumulation and continuity. This can ultimately contribute to larger and more severe fires that preclude suppression during extreme fire weather. Recent extreme fire seasons in the EU in 2017, 2022, and 2025 show how fires can overwhelm prevention and suppression efforts. As of August 2026, more than 600,000 hectares had burned in the EU—roughly twice the long term average of the last 20 years for this point in the year.
In response, some countries are putting a greater emphasis on prevention, fuel management, and prescribed fire. In 2017, prevention represented only 20% of Portuguese wildfire-management funding, but by 2021 it was 46%, bringing the share of prevention spending closer to that devoted to suppression and other response activities.
Beyond the climate change headlines
Decarbonization and climate change mitigation remain essential for limiting future global warming. But even the most aggressive mitigation targets cannot remove the fuels or reduce the vulnerabilities that already exist on the landscape today.
Understanding wildfire requires asking not only how the climate has changed, but how people have changed the land. Weather, fuels, ignitions, suppression, and land-use changes interact differently across landscapes, seasons, and individual fires. Treating recent wildfires as manifestations of climate change alone makes for a simple headline, but a poor explanation of why landscapes burn.
I haven't heard anyone say that wildfires are the result of "climate change" ALONE. As with hurricane activity - it's ADDED on intensity that's the problem.