Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons
We interviewed Dr. Panteleimon Xofis, Associate Professor at the Democritus University of Thrace, starting from one striking figure that clearly captures the scale of the emergency: in the summer of 2025, nearly 860,000 hectares of land burned across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. It was one of the worst wildfire seasons of the past twenty-five years, with the Mediterranean once again at the epicenter of the climate crisis.
The numbers, provided by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), tell a story not only of forests, habitats, and landscapes reduced to ash, but also of devastated communities, destroyed infrastructure, and lost lives. Spain and Portugal were hit the hardest, followed by Greece, Italy, and France—despite reinforced firefighting fleets, extensive ground forces, and an unprecedented activation of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
Fire, which for millennia has shaped Mediterranean ecosystems and contributed to biodiversity, has today turned into a destructive enemy, fueled by rural abandonment, the accumulation of dry vegetation, and global warming that makes summers increasingly hot and arid.
With Dr. Xofis, we sought to understand the real causes behind this escalation, the role of the climate crisis, and how local communities, national governments, and Europe as a whole can better prepare to live with a phenomenon that is no longer the exception but the rule.
Dr. Xofis, let’s start with the official data on the wildfires that affected the Mediterranean Europe area this summer.
Fire is an environmental factor with a long history on earth, dating back to the first appearance of terrestrial vegetation, and as a result it has played a vital role in the ecology and evolution of species, ecosystems and humans. While low intensity fires, resembling prehuman fire regimes, are important drivers for maintaining landscape and habitat heterogeneity and promote a number of important ecosystem services to humans, large high-intensity wildfires constitute a significant destructive factor for many biomes and ecosystems across the world. Man has dramatically changed fire behavior and regime, converting it into a primarily anthropogenic factor, with more than 464 million hectares affected annually by wildfires across the globe. In the Mediterranean Europe, in particular, fire affects an average area of 350 thousand hectares annually, with an interannual variation ranging from less than 100 thousand to almost one million hectares, following fluctuations in weather patterns. Wildfires do not only threaten the ecosystems’ ecological integrity, but in recent years they have been responsible for significant damages to infrastructures and properties and a high number of human fatalities.
In 2025 the Mediterranean Europe experienced the second most disastrous year since 2000, according to the data provided by the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). In Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece almost 860 thousand Ha were burned, with most of them being natural and semi-natural forests. The most hardly affected countries were Spain and Portugal followed by Italy, Greece and France. This, has occurred despite the increased amount of resources allocated to fire suppression, including a high number of aerial and land vehicles and fire fighters.
What is the cause of so many wildfires that hit Mediterranean Europe this summer and what is the role of global warming in increased wildfire activities?
The causes of wildfires are primarily anthropogenic. These include electrical infrastructure–related ignitions, ignitions resulting from careless human activities, traditional but illegal practices for the improvement of grasslands and the open burning of agricultural residues. A number of fires also originate from deliberate arson. Although arson is often claimed to be the primary source of wildfires, there is no convincing evidence to support this. Its frequent overemphasis can be misleading and may divert public attention from the actual predominant causes of wildfires.
The transition from an ignition to a wildfire—and, in some cases, to a megafire—is a multifactorial process in which global warming, among other factors, plays a significant role. The decade of 1970s seems to coincide with an important turning point in the behavior of wildland fires and their related consequences in the Mediterranean Europe, with a marked increase in the average annual area burned.
The availability of fuel has increased dramatically since the second half of the 20th century as a result of major socioeconomic changes which resulted in widespread agricultural abandonment in mountainous and semi-mountainous regions and a decline in agropastoral activities. These trends allowed woody semi-natural vegetation to expand into formerly cultivated lands and rangelands, increasing both the continuity and the total load of fuel.
At the same time global warming has resulted into significant changes in summer temperatures and temporal precipitation patterns. Summers are becoming hotter and drier and while the annual precipitation remains relatively stable, the summer precipitation — critical for preventing megafires — is declining. Together, the increased fuel availability and the intensification of summer xerothermality have shifted the relevant importance of weather conditions and fuel availability in determining the fire regime and behavior in favor of the former. As a result, fires have turned from being “fuel-driven” to being “weather-driven”. This simply means that while in the past a high-severity fire would only occur in the relatively rare cases where there was high fuel availability, today, where the fuel is generally available, high severity fires occur more often because favorable weather conditions (hot, dry) for fire occur more often. The summer of 2025 was another hot and dry summer as will be many summers in the years to come. This simply means that we need a more efficient wildfire management strategy which will take into account the new reality of increased fuel availability and favorable for fire weather conditions.
How can communities better prepare for wildfire seasons?
Communities can and must play a vital role in protecting the environment from wildfires as well as safeguarding properties and infrastructure. An essential first step in reducing ignitions is to raise public awareness of the potential consequences of careless activities, such as the burning of agricultural residues or the use of fire in outdoor activities during the fire season. Society should also be better informed about the consequences of climate change and the critical role of natural ecosystems—especially forests—in removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and in mitigating the broader impacts of climate change. Strengthening this understanding is expected to foster more environmentally responsible behavior and, in turn, to increase public engagement in environmental protection.
Voluntary groups have proven extremely effective both in preventing ignitions and in efficiently suppressing wildfires. In many cases, civilians patrol vulnerable areas to ensure rapid fire detection and an immediate initial attack. Furthermore, more organized volunteer groups possess equipment—including water-carrying vehicles and other firefighting tools—that enables them to suppress wildfires effectively. Given that these groups consist of local people with good knowledge of the peculiarities of an area they can be of great support to the fire fighting forces.
Finally, society can be better prepared to protect properties. Using fire-resistant building materials, maintaining low fuel loads in yards and open spaces, and following the guidelines issued by official authorities are all important steps in the right direction.
What concrete measures can individual governments take to prevent wildfires?
Governments are ultimately responsible for implementing environmental protection measures and therefore for developing and executing effective wildfire management strategies. A first and crucial step in such a strategy is to recognize the historical role of fire in shaping Mediterranean landscapes and to accept that the region will always remain fire-prone. This implies that the goal of wildfire management cannot be the unrealistic elimination of all wildfires, but rather the wise management of fire as an ecological process—transforming it from a destructive force into one that can be understood, anticipated, and managed within natural and human systems.
Governments can play a critical role in raising public awareness both of the need to protect natural environments and ecosystems and of the importance of preventing careless actions that can lead to wildfire ignitions. Furthermore, the development of voluntary groups requires an effective legislative framework and adequate resources to ensure proper training, health and safety protection, and insurance for volunteers. Maintaining at the same time a fire suppression system with properly and continuously trained personnel, equipped with state-of-the-art technology for fuel mapping, wildfire monitoring and fire spot detection is equally important.
One of the main reasons for the increased frequency of large and catastrophic wildfires is the increase of fuel load. This new reality imposes the need of landscape scale management measures for reducing fuel load, without degrading the aesthetic and ecological value of the landscape. Prescribed burning is an environmentally friendly method for reducing fuel load, which has low cost and high effectiveness. Its successful implementation, however, requires its inclusion in the legislative framework, and the appropriate training of personnel and authorities for its application. Because misuse of prescribed burning can have detrimental consequences for environment and the society, governments have to properly organize, regulate and promote its implementation. Implementation of a sustainable grazing regime which will reduce fuel load and at the same time will not jeopardize ecosystems’ ecological integrity is another environmentally friendly measure towards reducing the risk of high intensity fires.
Effective wildfire management requires serious and appropriate training of the responsible personnel. However, in many countries there is no distinct forest fire service. Instead, a general fire service is responsible for suppressing wildfires and at the same time responding to all other natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes. This situation does not promote the appropriate training of the personnel on the means and tactics to deal with wildfires or the implementation of fire prevention measures such as prescribed burning. Governments, should seriously consider establishing a distinct unit responsible for developing and implementing a holistic wildfire management strategy, which will include fire prevention, fire suppression and post fire restoration, supported by long-term training and adequate resources.
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025 (This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image acquired on 16 August 2025 shows dense smoke plumes rising from active fires near the city of Ourense, located in the autonomous community of Galicia, northwestern Spain.)
The EU Civil Protection Mechanism was activated 17 times during this summer’s fire season. What could the EU do to improve and strengthen the system?
RescEU was undoubtedly a step in the right direction for the effective control of large catastrophic wildfires. The fact that it was activated 17 times this year is a proof of its need and usefulness. However, the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires across Europe highlight the need to further strengthen the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. The current fleet of aircrafts and ground resources need to further be expanded in order to be able to respond in multiple crises that are likely to occur in the near future. Beyond that, EU must invest more in prevention and in increasing the level or preparedness by supporting large scale fuel management and nature restoration programs. Promotion of cross-border cooperation and coordination through joint training programs will support faster and more efficient response when multiple countries are affected simultaneously. The promotion of state-of-The-art early warning systems that take advantage of the most recent advances in satellite and drone based remote sensing, and in information and communication technologies is also critical for timely fire detection and initial attack. Equally important is funding for community engagement and climate adaptation measures that reduce ignition risk and build local resilience. By integrating these preventive and adaptive actions with stronger operational capacity, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism can evolve from a mainly reactive tool into a cornerstone of proactive wildfire management in a warming Mediterranean and European climate.
What role can technology play in preventing wildfires?
The proven difficulties in controlling the impacts of wildfires, and especially megafires, impose the need to reconsider wildfire management strategy and exploit the technological and methodological advances and the wide range of available data, which allow for the accurate estimation of wildfire risk. Remote sensing data and methods, and especially satellite derived spatial data allow the accurate and large scale mapping of vegetation and fuel from properly trained personnel. At the same time there is a number of tools that use advanced methods for data analysis, including Machine and Deep learning techniques and Artificial Intelligence which can map the wildfire risk, taking into account the vegetation structure and composition, the possibility of an ignition source and the past spatial patterns of pyric history. Furthermore, the drone technology can improve the efficiency of fire detection system and at the same time act as a mechanism preventing illegal or careless actions by civilians. Of course, their use should not be in contradiction with human rights and personal data.
Until today, the applied wildfire management strategies have relied almost exclusively in maintaining an effective fire suppression system. While this remains necessary it is certainly not sufficient. Recent studies have shown that the currently applied suppression-based approach has reached its limits of success by effectively suppressing more than 90% of fires at their early stages. Yet, this is not enough since it is only the 3% of wildfires that is responsible of the burning of the 75% of burned area annually. A contemporary and holistic wild fire management strategy must aim in the elimination of these few large and devastating wildfires and sustain a fire regime characterized by small and manageable fires.
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