Europe is enduring another brutal wildfire season, with data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) showing that more than 434,976 hectares have burned since the start of 2026. Some 1,407 fires have been detected, releasing an estimated 17.98 million tonnes of CO₂. A European Commission official admitted that “these fires are out of capacity,” as blazes spread faster than firefighting efforts can keep up.
The EU has spent the past two years building what it calls a more integrated wildfire strategy, with new funding, a new fleet, a new hub in Cyprus, and, since March 2026, a new philosophy that prioritises prevention over suppression. But as the summer pressure mounts, the question is whether the bloc’s toolkit is fit for purpose.
The EU’s firefighting toolkit
At the heart of the system is the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, a solidarity framework that allows an overwhelmed country to request help from other member states. It does not activate automatically – a state must ask for assistance, usually once a fire has outgrown its national capacity. The Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC) in Brussels runs the process around the clock, matching offers of aircraft, crews and equipment to the countries that need them, and co-financing transport.
Backing that up is rescEU, the EU’s strategic reserve of firefighting planes and helicopters, held for when national and pooled resources run short. Alongside it is the European Civil Protection Pool, made up of national assets that governments have pre-committed for EU-wide use. Layered on top are Copernicus, the satellite mapping service producing real-time maps of burn zones and infrastructure at risk, and EFFIS, which forecasts fire danger up to ten days ahead and tracks active fires every few hours.
New for 2026 is a firefighting hub in Cyprus, able to pre-position six aircraft, plus a dedicated Wildfire Support Team reinforcing the ERCC from June to September.
What has been deployed this summer
For the 2026 season, the Commission put 22 firefighting planes, 5 helicopters, 777 firefighters from 14 countries, and 21 certified teams on standby across 12 countries. As fires escalated in Iberia and France, France received seven planes and four helicopters, drawing crews and aircraft from Czechia, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, and Türkiye. Spain received six planes and three ground teams, with help arriving from Greece, Italy, Portugal and Türkiye. Five Canadian planes were split between the two. Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said the mechanism is “under pressure” but insisted “it is working.”
Yet the scale of the challenge is immense. The EU’s largest firefighting response has tested the limits of cross-border aid, and Greece has already lost two helicopter crew members as the Athens region remains on alert.
A strategy still on paper
In March, the Commission presented a communication on integrated wildfire risk management, reframing the EU’s approach around prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery as one continuous cycle rather than a seasonal scramble for planes. It acknowledged that Europe had spent years treating symptoms instead of causes, fighting ever-bigger fires rather than stopping the landscape from becoming so flammable.
Four months on, little of that has translated into new rules. Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told agriculture ministers in late May that the Commission does “not plan any new initiatives on forest management” and has no new indicators or guidelines in the pipeline. The one binding-adjacent document to emerge, a recommendation on integrated wildfire risk management adopted on 29 June, is non-binding. Forest management remains a national competence. A blocking minority, traditionally Sweden and Finland, often joined by France, has resisted giving Brussels more say, having helped stall the Nature Restoration Law in 2024 and pushed back on the proposed Forest Monitoring Law.
“We cannot just blame the fire situation on climate change”
Alexander Held, a forester at the European Forest Institute’s Pan-European Forest Risk Facility, has watched the pattern shift over 25 years in the field. “Now we have fires from Turkey over Greece to Spain to Portugal to France,” he said, describing the collapse of the old split fire season into something closer to simultaneous, year-round risk across the continent. “We see fires now up in Iceland, we see fires in Greenland, we see fire in the Arctic Rim,” he added, evidence, he said, that “the pyrogeography is definitely changing.”
But climate change is the enabler, not the whole story. “We cannot just blame the fire situation on climate change,” Held said, arguing that land management decisions, abandoned farmland, pine and eucalyptus monocultures, and forests with broken-up canopies, do “our part of making the landscape more flammable.” Even the newer EU instruments, he said, tilt toward hardware over resilience: “despite all the declarations, we don’t see the coordinated investment in the broader field of learning to live with fire,” because “it’s much easier still to invest in the response side” than in prevention.
Held points to Portugal as the counter-example, a country that “shifted its strategy from fire suppression to really fire management and investing 50 percent of the budget in land management and prevention.” His own wish, he said, would be a euro spent on resilience for every euro spent on suppression: “I would wish that we get a 50 percent leverage, any euro that is spent on suppression is going into this 5R framework.” Crucially, he warned against newly fire-prone countries assuming more trucks and planes is the answer, when even well-resourced states are losing control of major fires: “if other countries with a lot more resources and experience and capacity can’t control [these fires], how do we conclude, oh, let’s do the same and then we can control it?”
The EU is prepared, but stretched. Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen frames the shift in similar terms, if from inside the institution. “It is very clear that climate change is making each summer hotter and drier, and that is increasing the risk of wildfires across Europe,” she said. “That is why we are investing in both response and prevention, but we need member states to do their part as well.”
As the summer continues, the gap between the EU’s firefighting capacity and its slower efforts to make landscapes less flammable is becoming ever more apparent. Heatwaves are forcing Spanish toxic alerts, French reactor shutdowns, and Greek wildfires, while some are looking at European bison to help Spain’s forests resist wildfires. The EU’s strategy may be more serious than before, but it is still far from enough.
