site.btaEurope cannot fight wildfires without its farmers

Europe cannot fight wildfires without its farmers

By Stoyan Tchoukanov, President of the EESC Section for Agriculture, Rural Development and the Environment (NAT)

Every summer, Europe watches the same tragedy unfold once again. People lose their lives. Families are forced to flee their homes. Firefighters risk everything. Ancient forests are reduced to ashes. Unique biodiversity is lost forever. Countless wild animals perish in the flames. Farmers stand helplessly as fires consume fields, livestock and livelihoods built over generations. When Europe loses farms to fire, it also weakens its ability to produce food, sustain rural communities and build climate resilience for the future.

And every summer, we ask the same question: How did this happen again?

The answer is uncomfortable. Europe has become very good at reacting to wildfires. It is still not good enough at preventing them.

The recent fires across France, Spain, Greece and other parts of Europe are not isolated tragedies. They are symptoms of a continent living with a new climate reality. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent, droughts more prolonged and fire seasons longer than ever before. Scientists have warned us for years. Today, the flames are confirming those warnings with devastating clarity.

Climate change is accelerating the wildfire crisis. But so too is the abandonment of Europe's rural landscapes. Neither challenge can be ignored if we are serious about prevention. When fields are no longer cultivated, when grazing disappears and forests remain unmanaged, nature becomes increasingly vulnerable. Dry vegetation accumulates. Landscapes lose their natural firebreaks. A single spark can become an uncontrollable inferno.

For centuries, European farmers, livestock keepers and foresters have quietly performed one of the continent's most important environmental services: they have managed the land.

Every flock grazing a hillside removes combustible vegetation. Every cultivated field interrupts the continuity of vegetation that allows fires to spread. Every actively managed forest becomes more resilient. This is not a new strategy designed in Brussels. It is the accumulated knowledge of generations who understood that caring for the land was also the best way to protect it. It is, quite simply, common sense. Yet European policy still spends far more money fighting fires than preventing them.

Encouragingly, this is beginning to change. The European Commission deserves credit for recognising that wildfire management must evolve. Its new integrated wildfire strategy moves beyond emergency response and places greater emphasis on prevention, preparedness and resilient landscapes. That is an important and necessary shift. But ambition must now be matched by investment.

This is precisely why the European Economic and Social Committee recently called for prevention to become the cornerstone of European wildfire policy. We proposed a dedicated European wildfire prevention fund, stronger support for active land management and greater recognition of the indispensable role played by farmers, foresters and rural communities. 

Because prevention is not simply about buying more aircraft. It is about ensuring that someone is still living, farming and caring for Europe's landscapes. Farmers are not simply food producers. They are the people who care for Europe's landscapes. When farming becomes economically unsustainable, land is abandoned, natural firebreaks disappear and the conditions for catastrophic wildfires intensify.

Supporting farmers is therefore not only agricultural policy.

It is climate policy.

It is biodiversity policy.

It is civil protection policy.

It is food security policy.

Two years ago, the EESC brought together the voices of farmers across Europe in a short documentary explaining how climate change was already transforming their daily lives. They spoke about drought, crop failures, uncertainty and the growing struggle to produce food in an increasingly hostile climate. They spoke of the heartbreaking loss of livestock, fields and livelihoods. Today, those testimonies sound less like warnings and more like predictions that have already come true.

Europe's farmers are among the first to experience the consequences of climate change. They should also be among the first partners in designing its solutions.

As another wildfire season unfolds, Europe should resist the temptation to measure success solely by the number of aircraft deployed or fires extinguished. The real measure of success is whether there are fewer catastrophic fires to fight next year. That depends not only on firefighters' courage, but on political courage.

Europe will not solve the wildfire crisis simply by becoming better at fighting fires. It will solve it by becoming better at preventing them, through decisive action on the climate crisis and by investing in the farmers, foresters and rural communities who have cared for Europe's landscapes for generations.