Fontainebleau Forest video - France
by Ajit Niranjan and Caroline Davies
As the climate crisis fuels more intense blazes, pushing them to new
parts of the world, those tackling them are forced to ration resources
and decide which to fight
César Alcaraz had only just become a firefighter
in the late 1990s when he found himself ambushed by a fast-moving blaze.
Barely able to breathe and with no more water left in his truck, he and
his colleagues fled an inferno ravaging Spain’s Montgó mountain region,
wishing their bosses had sent more support.
But
nearly three decades on, as an officer with Alicante’s provincial
firefighters, Alcaraz has more sympathy for the agonising choices that
commanders have to make. When wildfires overwhelm an area, his job
resembles that of a doctor in an emergency room with too few
ventilators.
It is a dilemma growing more
onerous as wildfires worsen across the Mediterranean – and is beginning
to confront countries as cold as the UK, where wildfires are invading
cities, homes and gardens.
Flames and smoke rise from a wildfire near the municipality of El Pocico in Almería, Spain, earlier in July. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images
“It’s not just about having more fires to fight, it’s the risk of
operational collapse,” said Alcaraz, who sits in the command centre and
sees concurrent blazes occurring more often and earlier in the year.
“When two or three fires break out simultaneously, we are forced to make
immediate triage decisions.”
Deadly wildfires have engulfed western Europe this month – the grim consequence of a trio of heatwaves
that have turned lush vegetation into dry tinder – while separate
blazes suffocate North America with cloying smoke. France, Portugal and
Spain have each been torched by a record-breaking number of wildfires
for this time of year, leaving an unprecedented area of France in flames
and 13 people dead in Spain. The UK began the week with 19 separate wildfires that led experts to warn of a “firewave” more widespread than ever before.
Fires in northern Ontario in Canada caused
poor air quality in Toronto, which had the worst air quality of any
major city in the world on Wednesday. Photograph: Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images
Across the Atlantic, smoke from 100 fires burning northern Ontario made Toronto the most polluted city in the world
on Wednesday before it crossed the US border to choke New York.
Far-reaching fumes from Canadian wildfires are so strong they caused
82,000 early deaths in 2023, a study found last year, including 33,000 in the US and 22,000 in Europe.
On Friday, the EU’s Copernicus agency said summer smoke was causing
“extremely poor” air quality warnings in areas such as New Jersey, which
hosts the World Cup final on Sunday.
The
problem is not just the hectarage. Perhaps surprisingly, the global
trend in wildfire size has been toward fewer hectares of burnt land,
largely because huge tracts of African savannah
that were susceptible to fires are now fragmented by farmland. But
where fires burn, they are often hotter, less predictable, and greater
in number. Carbon pollution has raised global temperatures, and with
more heat to dry out plants, small fires can more easily escalate into
hellish infernos. This allows wildfires to spread into areas – in
forests and moorlands, but also in cities, parks and gardens – that were
not as vulnerable before, increasing the danger at what researchers
call the wildland-urban interface.
In France, such extreme scenarios are forcing authorities to divide scarce resources.
Firefighters
in France tackled 250-300 fires simultaneously over the past three
weeks, said Julien Marion, the head of the civil protection agency,
during a visit to the smouldering Fontainebleau forest on Thursday.
People watch as a firefighting plane tackles a wildfire next to the A9 motorway near Béziers, in south-west France. Photograph: Abdul Saboor/Reuters
In Spain, firefighters used to dealing with a
couple of blazes at a time say they struggle with an increase in number
and strength. The situation has been worsened by recent wet winters and springs that allow vegetation to flourish
– leaving more surplus fuel when it inevitably dries in summer – as
well as the abandonment of farmland that once broke up flammable
countryside. On Thursday, authorities said they expected a large fire in
rural Aragón, one of dozens still burning across the country, to take
days to control.
“In the end, the response
capacity is limited,” said Juan Caamaño, the head of training at the Pau
Costa Foundation, a nonprofit that is helping Northern Ireland and
other cold regions in northern Europe
prepare for worsening wildfires. “When we face these huge fires, these
extreme events, it’s like trying to put firefighters on a beach to stop a
tsunami.”
In the UK, where the threat of
fires is more present in grass than in forests, blazes have broken out
from cities to national parks this month after a scorchingly hot start
to summer. A wildfire that ripped through Walthamstow in east London
last weekend, which is thought to have been caused by a falling tree
that hit power cables above a railway line, drew about 125 firefighters
to put out a blaze. Strong wind and dry vegetation helped it spread
fast.
A wildfire at the Cairngorms national park
near Nethy Bridge, which firefighters worked through the night to
contain as people were evacuated this week. Photograph: RSPB Scotland/PA
“One of the alarming things I was seeing over the
weekend was large parts of the country where the probability of
sustained ignition was 100%,” said Dr Thomas Smith, a wildfire scientist
at the London School of Economics. “Especially for grass fuels, which
dry out very quickly, it only requires 2-3 weeks of dry weather to reach
those thresholds.”
“The climate of the 20th century is now gone,” UK scientists said on Wednesday in a report that found last year was the country’s hottest on record.
Average temperatures virtually unknown in the 1980s now cover almost a
fifth of the land, the scientists said, as fire services fought to put
out blazes from Durham in the north to Devon in the south-west. The next
day, a wildfire burned 300 hectares (740 acres) in Scotland’s
Cairngorms national park.
“Simultaneous
wildfires place enormous pressure on emergency services,” said Dr Maria
Barbosa, a wildfire scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and
Hydrology. “Fire agencies depend on their ability to move personnel,
equipment and aircraft between regions as conditions change. But when
multiple large fires occur at the same time, that flexibility is greatly
reduced.”
The shift from fighting all fires
to picking battles is “a very new thing for northern European
countries”, said Smith, though not for the Mediterranean. “They’re
having to change tactics when they fight fires, while we’re really
struggling with strategic decisions.”
Homes in Wennington, Greater London, were gutted by fire during the UK’s extreme heatwave in July 2022. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Fresh in the memories of London’s firefighters is
the wildfire that destroyed 18 houses in Wennington village during a
ferocious heatwave in July 2022, in the worst day for the London fire
brigade since German bombs set fire to the city in the second world war.
To be more flexible, the service has since bought four all-terrain
support vehicles that are agile enough to reach places that fire engines
cannot. Able to “pump and drive”, the firefighting 4x4s have been
mobilised 34 times this year, including for regular fires.
The
London fire brigade has also encouraged local authorities and private
land owners to introduce natural fire breaks by cutting down grass near
homes and businesses, ploughing land to remove flammable materials, and
clearing dead leaves from gutters – the types of strategy Australians know well – to stop fires from spreading.
Such
advice has grown more pertinent as the number of firefighters has
fallen. Steve Wright, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union,
said crews had been stretched by staffing cuts – with 12,000 fewer
firefighters in the UK today than in 2010 – that delayed them from
getting to incidents, resulting in more fires that grow out of control.
“This is only going to get worse, and the government has to get a handle
on it,” he said. “This is not moorland, not heathland. It’s happening
in towns, cities and villages across the UK.”
A burning forest on a hillside near Longwood in Victoria, Australia, as bushfires spread in January 2026. Photograph: Michael Currie/Reuters
The strains that local services feel are being
echoed at a global level, too. Fire seasons in North America and
Australia are getting longer and increasingly coincide, hampering
longstanding arrangements to share aircraft and firefighters between the
US, Canada and Australia. The overlap between the two regions is
expected to increase to between four and 29 days each year by 2050, a study found last year.
While climate breakdown is the main driver of increasingly “synchronous” global fire seasons, according to research
published in February, natural variation often makes it worse. The
return of El Niño, the cyclical weather pattern that supercharges
weather extremes, has alarmed Australia and Indonesia because of the
greater risk of fires that it brings. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said this week
that the emerging El Niño could be the strongest on record, and may be
joined by a positive Indian Ocean dipole, a related weather pattern
that, with El Niño, has led to some of Australia’s hottest and driest
years. Swathes of south-east Asia and Oceania may soon be in flames.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, addresses the media after a wildfire killed at least 13 people in Almería province. Photograph: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images
Are governments taking the threat seriously? “The
climate emergency kills,” said Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of
Spain, during a visit on Monday to the advanced command post in Almería
from which firefighters last week quelled one of the country’s deadliest
blazes on record. “As a result, all levels of government and society as
a whole must rise to the challenge before us.”
And
yet policies to cut carbon pollution in rich countries fall far short
of what would be needed to stop the planet from heating 1.5C (2.7F)
above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Meanwhile,
efforts to use fire to manage the land – for instance with controlled
burns that prevent the overgrowth that fuels mega-fires – are still
considered novel in the same countries. The exceptions are Canada and Australia, which have made efforts to incorporate Indigenous fire strategies instead of relying on suppression.
In
Europe, the cultural shift among firefighters has begun to trickle up
into policy. In late June, EU member states approved a non-binding
strategy to manage wildfire risk that encourages prescribed burning,
manual brush clearing and more diverse landscapes. Its civil protection
mechanism, which allows embattled member states to request firefighting
support from neighbours, was increased this year by pre-emptive
deployments of firefighters from other regions. In 2025, record-breaking
wildfires that charred 1m hectares led to more requests for help than
ever before.
A fireguard aircraft from France’s civil
security drops fire-retardant substance over a wildfire in
Pouzols-Minervois, south-west France, in early July. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
But, while the mechanism itself was “working
perfectly”, firefighting teams were being deployed in extreme situations
the likes of which they had never seen, said Caamaño. He was speaking
from Indonesia, where he was preparing firefighting teams for the “wild burn” that south-east Asia would soon face.
“I
have the feeling that we’re always behind the emergency,” he said. “And
it is the emergency that governs us, rather than us governing the
emergency.”
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