Europe Central: Spain Has Fought A Long And Hard Summer Battle With Wildfires. What Has It Learned?
reuters
To the onlookers seeing the images of a wildfire razing huge swathes of land, it seems hellish. Hundreds of thousands of hectares are ruined and thousands of people are forced to flee, often at a moment's notice. But to the firefighters in northern Spain, it’s just another summer.
Every year, southern Europe is forced to grapple with the consequences of a climate increasingly predisposed to wildfires during its hot months, and for the past few years, the situation has continued to worsen.
Experts, both in Europe and across the world, have been raising alarms about the dangers of mismanaged land and underfunded wildfire prevention initiatives. Even last year, the Spanish Council of Ministers announced a new forest fire prevention plan to prepare for the upcoming wildfire season. But to no avail.
With this summer’s fires burning a record amount of land once again, Spain had to request assistance in both finances and personnel from across Europe. Where has Spanish wildfire control improved, where must it still take steps, and what can its neighbors do and learn to help southern Europe combat a growing climate emergency?
New Year, Same Story, Catastrophic Result
Since the beginning of the year, the wildfires are estimated to have burned over 382,607 hectares (about 3,800 km2) across 228 separate fires, some of which continue to rage across northern Spain. Four people have died so far while tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate across the country.
"This is a fire situation we haven't experienced in 20 years," Defence Minister Margarita Robles told the Spanish radio network Cadena SER, a situation that prompted the nation to use the European Union’s Civil Protection Mechanism, for the first time in the nation’s history. The mechanism allows other nations to offer resources in the event of disasters, and nations like France, Germany, and Italy have answered the call.
In response to the latest season of fires, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on September 1 that Spain's preparation was “clearly insufficient”, citing a lack of firefighters, prediction tools, inadequate land management, and climate change as the causes.
But these issues have sat on ministers’ desks for years. In 2018, there was a distinct lack of Spanish training manuals and other resources for wildfire crews. In 2019, research was already pointing out the shortcomings of Spanish building and urban planning standards, residential vegetation management, and water supply networks.
After the historically damaging fires of 2023, experts were warning about the need to conserve Spain's forests and increase funding and training of its firefighters. Even this past May, before the brunt of the fires, scientists predicted unusually warm weather this wildfire season.
This is not to say that the Spanish government has been completely negligent of the issue; since 2021, the Plan Nacional de Adaptación al Cambio Climático has been a wide-ranging climate adaptation plan that includes combating wildfires. Last year, Project “ARIEM+” set up a framework for Northern Portugal and the Spanish regions of Galicia and Castilla y León to coordinate cooperation, existing resources, and response strategies.
In fact, local states have spearheaded new projects. Castilla-La Mancha’s Master Plan for Defence Against Forest Fires and Galicia’s annual Prevention and Defence Plan against Forest Fires are both comprehensive plans for wildfire prevention, protection, awareness, monitoring, extinguishing, and training, with explicit budgets and targets.
But a 2025 European Court of Auditors report found that at both the national and local level, many action plans are still in planning stages, often lacking funding needs and presenting only frameworks for organizing responses. There is also a distinct lack of enforcement of new laws and policies that are meant to aid in wildfire efforts, a problem that extends beyond Spain’s borders. While these frameworks are good steps, this summer has shown the cost of falling behind climate change’s pace.
New Practices Make Perfect…
In light of all this, during a visit to the fire-struck areas in mid-August, Pedro Sanchez vowed to create a new national climate pact. He proposed a rethink of forest management and land use, improvements to firefighting capacity, a plan to increase water resilience, and initiatives to fight rural depopulation. This depopulation is especially troublesome, as it leaves land unmanaged and creates hot-spots of combustible material in rural areas.
The pact would also coordinate measures with Portugal and France, who both also struggle to contain wildfires, and with the experience already gained from this summer working together, future cooperative efforts have a good foundation to work off of.
Local municipalities are also taking larger steps than before. The region of Castilla-La Mancha has vowed an investment of €60 million in fire prevention for 2025, part of a €116 million budget dedicated to its forest fire campaign that includes the maintenance and adaptation of infrastructure to support wildfire control.
Many of these initiatives are part of a broader shift in thinking around combating and, more importantly, preventing wildfires. There is a renewed focus on managing the wildland-urban interface, which is where buildings and wildland vegetation intermingle. According to the European Commission, 96% of wildfires in the EU are caused by human actions, and reducing the amount of development in this wildland-urban interface can help prevent fires spreading from the wild to residential areas, and vice versa.
… But Old Strategies Make A Comeback
There is also an interesting shift away from eliminating fire from ecosystems and towards acknowledging how fire is a natural dynamic in ecosystems. Through prescribed burns, which are controlled wildfires set to clear areas of natural fuel, larger wildfires can be prevented while also reducing wildfire hazards and releasing nutrients back into the soil.
But there is another important lesson to be learned in fire prevention, one that Spain is beginning to embrace. The role of farming and grazing in land management has long been associated with the prevention of wildfires, especially in Spain. Nomads have long allowed animals to do the work of prescribed burns by feeding on combustible plants, and Spanish regions today are learning from the past.
Last year in Catalonia, the use of goat herds to clear brush helped reduce the number of wildfire outbreaks, despite being in the third year of the worst drought in a century. Similarly, in Galicia, wild horses also feed on especially combustible plants, despite their numbers dwindling to half of their number in the 1970s.
These historical practices are backed up by contemporary studies that show wild horses were best for preventing wildfires while promoting plant biodiversity and capturing carbon. Additionally, economists say that investing in the wild horse population has the potential to save the government money by reducing the number of prescribed burns, which can be expensive.
Through investment in infrastructure and firefighting operations, cooperation with neighbors, and a revamped usage of the tried and true grazing strategies of old, Spain, and by extension southern Europe, has a chance to keep wildfires from becoming the yearly disaster it has recently evolved into.
As the climate continues to change, each summer will require an all-hands-on-deck approach to avoid the worst case scenario. While Pedro Sanchez’s government will need to overcome political infighting, there is hope that the steps Spain takes this year will finally be large enough to meet the moment.
