Climate change mitigation is the only effective strategy to prevent Europe from burning out of control in the long term

Europe is burning at a rate that defies human response capacity and dismantles decades of apparent successes in containing fire. Although improvements in prevention and extinction managed to reduce the burned area and the number of ignitions since the 1980s, the picture changed drastically from 2018 onwards. An international scientific team has documented that southern Europe is entering an era of extreme risk. National statistics reveal that the crisis reached unprecedented levels in the 2025 season, when Spain experienced its most destructive year in more than three decades with approximately 350,000 hectares burned. A catastrophe that includes the horrific Larouco fire in Galicia, the largest recorded in that community with more than 40,000 hectares consumed. In that same year, Portugal suffered the loss of more than 250,000 hectares, its worst record since the tragic 2017 season.

Continue reading in Elobrero