by Guillermo Rein

After two decades studying wildfires across continents, and watching Europe burn every summer, I keep returning to the same uncomfortable conclusion: this is not a failure of the fire service or a government. It is a failure of society.

In this guest post, Professor Guillermo Rein peers into the near future to assess Europe preparations for the 2026 wildfire season, based on the historic recent wildfire seasons.

The 2025 wildfire season in the European Union finished with a total burnt area of 1,034,552 ha, according to the European Forest Fires Information System. The European Commission confirmed 2025 to be the worst for wildfire since records began in 2006.

Wildfire activity was especially high in Portugal, Spain, southern France, southern Italy, Greece, Türkiye, Ukraine, and parts of the UK. Most fires over 5,000 ha (purple circles) occurred in the western Iberian Peninsula, though central and eastern Mediterranean areas were also affected. Smaller fires were widespread across continental Europe and Scandinavia, showing extensive wildfire risk and incidents in 2025.

In his extraordinary book ‘Collapse’, Jared Diamond offers a framework that is forensically useful. He describes four generic ways societies fail when facing existential challenges. Applied to European wildfires, the fit is disturbingly close. The four failures to anticipate, perceive, attempt or succeed.

I. Failure to anticipate.
Europe did not anticipate a shift towards systematically more flammable landscapes. Slow fuel accumulation from rural abandonment, climate change, expanding built areas close to forests, the early stages of wildfire exclusion, and the disregard of hard international lessons from North America and Australia, were all treated as separate issues rather than as a comprehensive and evolving hazard.

II. Failure to perceive.
Early signals from southern Europe were framed as exceptional summers or problems of disorderly countries, not as indicators of a changing wildfire regime. At the same time, public voices from independent scientists and practitioners were often ignored, sidelined, or dismissed as bizarre or alarmist, instead of recognised as the warnings.

III. Failure to attempt to solve.
Once the destruction trend became visible, summer after summer, even in northern latitudes, action lagged and often lacked coherence. Landscape-scale forest management and protection of rural areas remained politically difficult. European research funding on wildfires arrived late, sometimes very late, and is frequently fragmented or poorly aligned with the realities of wildfire behaviour.

IV. Failure to succeed in solving.
In the absence of a real understanding of the European wildfire problem, resources flowed mainly into suppression and firefighting. Suppression is only one layer of protection, the last resort, yet it was treated as the only solution. Prevention, detection, compartmentation, evacuation, and hardening of communities lagged behind, while wildfire destruction exceeded known levels.

The current situation reveals failures that accumulate quietly over decades.

If Europe wants to mitigate wildfire disasters and protect its citizens, it must stop asking how to fight more wildfires, and speed up asking how to understand and manage them better.

Guillermo Rein is a Professor of Fire Science at Imperial College, London. He created and leads the research group Imperial Hazelab.