After two consecutive years of devastating wildfires, the European Union is fundamentally rethinking how it confronts fire. The new approach, formalized in March 2026, shifts the emphasis from buying more planes and deploying more firefighters to preventing blazes from escalating in the first place. The logic is simple: once a fire ignites under hot, dry, and windy conditions, no amount of equipment can guarantee control.
According to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), more than 434,976 hectares have burned across the EU so far this year. In 2025, over one million hectares were lost, making it the worst season on record. These figures have forced Brussels to acknowledge that the old playbook—centered on suppression—is no longer adequate.
Why response alone was never going to work
Alexander Held, a forester at the European Forest Institute and the Pan-European Forest Risk Facility, has spent 25 years working on fire policy. He points to the simultaneous fires currently raging from Portugal to Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, and even Germany. "If you look at what's happening right now, we have simultaneous large fires," he says. "These conditions overwhelm even the most experienced fire services."
Held is critical of where EU money has historically gone. Despite two decades of declarations about resilience and prevention, funding has remained skewed toward suppression. "It's not as easy as buying a fire truck or a helicopter," he explains. He cites Portugal as a rare exception: the country shifted roughly half its wildfire budget into land management and prevention. His wish is a simple 50-50 rule—every euro spent on suppression matched by one spent on reducing risk before ignition.
The European Commission has adopted that logic as policy. "We cannot focus only on literally putting out fires," says Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, the Commission's spokesperson for energy, climate, environment, and transport. "Preparedness for us is really, really important."
The policy shift, and when it happened
The break came in March 2026 when the Commission launched its Integrated Wildfire Risk Management strategy. This formal move away from a response-led model is built on four pillars: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery—with prevention first. The reasoning is threefold. Europe just lived through its worst fire season on record. Climate change is making fires hotter, longer, and harder to control. And an estimated 96 percent of ignitions are linked to negligence or arson, meaning prevention must address human behavior as much as vegetation.
Fires are also spreading beyond the Mediterranean into Germany, Czechia, and Sweden, and even as far as Iceland and the Arctic Rim. This geographic expansion added urgency. A strategy built only around Southern European response capacity no longer matched where the risk actually lies.
What prevention looks like in practice
The strategy translates into concrete funding and tools already being rolled out. Wildfire prevention money now flows through several EU instruments at once: the Common Agricultural Policy's rural development plans, cohesion policy funds, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and LIFE and Horizon Europe research calls. In practice, that pays for fuel reduction, firebreaks, targeted grazing, forest thinning, and restoring fire-prone landscapes. These projects are already running in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Sicily.
About 35 percent of the EU's next long-term budget is earmarked for climate and environment, including close to €19 billion in cohesion funds for climate adaptation, with a promised fast-track for the regions hit hardest. The Commission is also reinforcing EFFIS, its satellite-based early warning and risk-forecasting tool, and plans to propose a council recommendation on integrated wildfire risk management, alongside a dedicated EU portal by 2027 to share funding routes and lessons learned with member states newly facing fire risk.
Response capacity hasn't disappeared. rescEU is adding twelve firefighting planes and five helicopters, but Itkonen is explicit about the order of priorities: "The goal is not to fight more fires. The goal is to have good prevention policies."
Turning strategy into practice
The harder problem is implementation. The European Court of Auditors has warned that wildfire governance remains fragmented across civil protection, forestry, agriculture, and climate departments, with no single overview of how much is spent on prevention. Tools like prescribed burning and targeted grazing often stall on permitting bottlenecks and liability rules. Prevention projects need sustained, recurring funding for maintenance, which EU instruments built for one-off investment aren't always designed to provide.
For Held, efforts should go beyond simply providing financial support by establishing independent and non-bureaucratic centres of excellence which are as flexible as fire itself. Drawing in foresters, farmers, and land planners rather than sending all matters through the civil protection agencies.
His example of what prevention is worth: Germany spends around €30 million a year fighting recurring fires on contaminated land. Halving just one of those fires would free up €15 million, enough to fund real prevention work. "It's difficult to argue," he admits, "because the one is disaster response money, and it's difficult to bridge that into prevention."
As the EU grapples with the reality of a warming continent, the shift toward prevention is a recognition that the old ways are no longer enough. Whether the funding and political will can keep pace remains to be seen, but the direction is clear.
