WILDFIRESIs the EU Doing Enough to Prepare for Wildfires?
Europe faces more intense wildfires due to climate change, prompting the EU to expand its response. Experts stress the need for preventive actions and sustainable forest management.
Last summer, flames devoured homes and olive groves as they raged uncontrollably for days in Greece, engulfing an area bigger than New York City and leaving white ash and mourning in their wake.
It was the biggest fire ever recorded in Europe.
While wildfires are a natural annual occurrence, rising temperatures and intensified drought periods are creating drier, fire-prone weather that makes them burn faster, longer and more ferociously.
In Europe, as around the globe, they are becoming more frequent, intense and widespread. In 2023 alone, they scorched an area around twice the size of Luxembourg, causing more than €4 billion ($4.3 billion) in damages and releasing 20 megatons of climate-heating CO2 emissions into the air — equivalent to nearly a third of all annual emissions from international aviation in the EU.
But with rising temperatures expected to increase the risk of wildfires across Europe, is the continent prepared?
Europe Is Expanding Fire Response
“Forest fires are getting more and more significant,” said Balazs Ujvari, a spokesperson for the European Commission. “More and more we find situations where member states are not able to cope.”
The focus of the EU’s fire response so far has been the expansion of firefighting capabilities through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism and RescEU program, which lend support to countries dealing with extreme wildfires.
Last year, its fleet of planes, helicopters and firefighters doubled in size, with the fire in Greece mobilizing the biggest EU aerial response operation to date.
Ahead of this year’s fire season Ujvari said they have 28 planes, four helicopters and 556 firefighters stationed across four fire-prone countries. A further €600 million has been allocated to further expanding the fleet by the end of the decade.
Ujvari added that the EU can also provide images of affected areas from its Copernicus satellite system to help local authorities monitor and tackle blazes.
Firefighting Alone Isn’t Enough
Yet some scientists and policy experts argue the EU could do more to prevent fires starting in the first place.
Around 90% of EU funding for tackling wildfires goes into response, and only 10% into prevention, according to one estimate from German EU lawmaker Anna Deparnay-Grunenberg.
The occurrence of fires that are extremely difficult to bring under control — such as those during Portugal’s 2017 wildfire season that burned a total of 500,000 hectares and claimed over 100 lives — highlight the limits of prioritizing fire response, said Alexander Held, senior expert at the European Forest Institute.
