When the European Commission presented its long-awaited wildfire strategy in March, it promised a fundamental shift: less money spent on emergency firefighting, more investment in prevention. Four months later, as flames consume tens of thousands of hectares across Spain and France, that promise looks hollow.
The strategy acknowledged that the EU had become trapped in a costly cycle of extinguishing increasingly intense fires rather than preventing them. It proposed paying farmers and foresters to thin forests, graze livestock, restore abandoned land, and revive wetlands as natural firebreaks. But these measures require years to take effect, and many remain on paper.
At a gathering of agriculture ministers in Brussels on 26 May, Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall stated that the Commission did “not plan any new initiatives on forest management” and did “not plan any additional indicators or guidelines at this point.” The EU has instead fallen back on the same emergency tools it had warned were no longer sufficient: deploying rescEU firefighting aircraft, dispatching cross-border teams, and mobilising civil protection resources as successive countries request assistance.
Member states block progress
Much of the responsibility lies with national governments. Forest management, land-use planning, and civil protection remain largely national competences. For years, a blocking minority in the Council has prevented any meaningful EU regulation of forest management. Sweden and Finland have traditionally led the resistance, but France has frequently joined them on key files, insisting that sustainable forest management should stay a national matter. Paris notably helped stall the Nature Restoration Law in 2024 and has argued against giving Brussels greater influence over how member states manage their forests.
Throughout 2024, several EU countries pushed back against the Commission's proposed Forest Monitoring Law, claiming it would give Brussels too much influence. The recommendation for EU countries on integrated wildfire risk management, adopted on 29 June, remains an unbinding piece of paper.
Martin Pigeon, forest and climate campaigner at the NGO Fern, said the dramatic blaze burning thousands of hectares of Gironde's pine plantations was “absolutely foreseeable.” “Some areas burning today had already burned 4 years ago, yet had been replanted with pines again! The mainstream forestry industry is trapped in a monoculture plantation-clearcut cycle whose costs are borne by the whole of society, but its grip on forestry policy has blocked any meaningful EU regulation of forest management so far,” Pigeon told Euronews. “How long is society going to pay the enormous economic, climate and health costs of this industry's comparably small profits?”
The situation in Gironde is particularly acute, with fires threatening not only homes but also the regional economy and defence industry, as we reported earlier. In Spain, the firefighting bill alone has reached up to €3.275 billion, according to recent estimates detailed in our analysis.
Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that Europe's fire season is becoming longer, more intense, and less predictable. The Commission's own strategy accepts that no amount of emergency capacity will be enough unless forests and rural landscapes become more resilient. Yet the political attention and funding that surge after catastrophic fires rarely translate into sustained investment in preventive landscape management.
As southern Europe braces for another heatwave, the gap between Brussels' ambitions and the reality on the ground grows ever wider. The EU's wildfire strategy may be a step in the right direction, but it has come too late to make a difference this summer — and without stronger commitment from member states, it may struggle to do so in the years ahead.
