Insight, Adaptation & Rural Transition
Europe's landscapes did not burn like this when people grazed, coppiced and farmed them. Fuel management was never a service anybody bought. It was a by-product of a livelihood, and you cannot purchase a by-product directly without changing what it costs.
As of 26 August 2026, 634,022 hectares had burned across the European Union. That is below the 984,559 hectares recorded by the same date in 2025, the worst year on record, and roughly double the 2006 to 2025 average of 313,246 hectares.
Both halves of that sentence matter. This is not the worst year, and it is twice a twenty year average that already includes several catastrophic seasons. The distribution has moved, and the tail has moved further than the mean.
The national figures show where. By early August, Spain accounted for around 38 per cent of the EU total, more than double its own fourteen year average for the date, while France had burned more than three times its average, the worst year since 2012. A fire beginning near Saumos in the Gironde burned about 42,000 hectares within five days and forced roughly 220,000 evacuations.
The European Commission increasingly attributes this not only to hotter and drier conditions, but to rural depopulation, abandoned agricultural land, declining grazing and inadequate forest management.
That framing is correct and it is usually left at the level of an observation. It is worth taking seriously as a claim about economics, because doing so changes what the policy response should be.
The structural change is measurable. European forest area has increased by around 11 per cent since 1990, while total cropland and grassland declined over the same period. Some of that is deliberate afforestation. A great deal of it, particularly around the Mediterranean, is abandoned agricultural land undergoing natural regeneration into forest, shrubland and other woody vegetation.
The consequence is fuel accumulation across formerly managed landscapes, and more importantly fuel continuity. A grazed pasture, an orchard or a cultivated field interrupts a fire. A continuous shrubland does not. The difference between a landscape that burns in patches and one that burns in a single run is not the total quantity of vegetation but whether it is broken up.
There is a second mechanism that compounds this and has a name. Allocating the overwhelming majority of wildfire management resources to suppression produces what has been called a firefighting trap: successful suppression of small fires allows fuel to accumulate and connect, which eventually produces fires that cannot be suppressed at all under extreme weather. Europe has become extremely good at putting out the fires it can put out, which is part of why the ones it cannot are so large.
Here is the reframing that the depopulation observation implies and rarely states.
Nobody in a Spanish village in 1960 was managing fuel loads. They were grazing sheep, cutting firewood, coppicing chestnut, clearing terraces, and cultivating land that was marginal but worth cultivating given the alternatives. Fire behaviour was shaped by all of that, continuously, across the whole landscape, at no cost to any public budget.
In economic terms, fuel discontinuity was a joint output. Grazing produced lamb and, incidentally, a break in the fuel bed. Firewood collection produced heat and, incidentally, removed surface fuel. Cultivation produced food and, incidentally, a firebreak. Only one output in each pair had a market. The other was free, unpriced, unmeasured and, crucially, produced whether or not anybody valued it.
When the priced output failed, the unpriced one went with it. The lamb market weakened, the young left for cities and coastal work, the terraces stopped paying, and the fire benefit disappeared silently because nothing was ever recorded as being lost.
This is the mechanism, and it means the fire problem is a livelihood problem wearing hazard vocabulary.
One activity produced two things. Only one paid.
Buying the unpriced output back directly requires a scheme, an eligibility rule, an inspector, an appeals process and a budget line that survives the next fiscal cycle. It also requires somebody still living there who knows the ground and is willing to do it. The unpriced output was never cheap because it was efficiently produced. It was cheap because somebody was already there doing something else.
The cost comparison, where it has been made, is stark. The EU LIFE Landscape Fire project has been reported as putting the cost of reintroducing grazing at around 60 to 80 euros per hectare, against roughly 1,000 euros per hectare for manual fuel clearing. If that holds, prevention through grazing is between twelve and seventeen times cheaper than the mechanical alternative, and both are far cheaper than suppression and reconstruction.
That figure needs verifying against the project itself before anybody builds a case on it, and it is flagged accordingly. But the direction is not in dispute, and it produces an uncomfortable conclusion: the constraint on European wildfire prevention is not primarily money and not primarily technique.
It is that there are not enough people in the landscape to do it.
This is the part that matters for programme design, and it is where most schemes go wrong.
Paying a shepherd per hectare for fuel reduction is not the same transaction as a shepherd grazing sheep because there is a market for lamb. It looks similar and behaves completely differently.
A payment for practice buys the practice for as long as the payment lasts. It requires an eligibility rule, a mapping exercise, an inspection regime, an appeals process, and a budget line that has to be defended against every other claim on the rural budget at each cycle. It attracts people who will do the work while it is paid and stop when it is not. And it produces exactly the persistence problem that afflicts every scheme where the benefit accrues to somebody other than the person doing the work.
Farm viability buys the person. A working holding with a route to market, a road, a vet, a school and a plausible succession produces fuel management continuously, without a scheme, as a consequence of somebody's ordinary work.
And the person is what actually matters, for a reason that has nothing to do with cost. Fuel management is not an annual treatment applied to a polygon. It is a continuous presence that notices things: the track that has become impassable, the line that is arcing against a branch, the ignition at eleven in the morning that one person with a beater can stop and that nobody sees until two. A landscape with people in it has a detection and first response system that no budget line replaces.
The policy implication is not that payment schemes are wrong. They are the only instrument available on the timescale the fires are arriving. It is that they should be understood as a stopgap purchased at a premium, running alongside the slower question of whether anybody can make a living there, rather than as the solution.
Not all abandonment is reversible, and reversal is not always desirable. The people are gone, they are old where they remain, and the economic conditions that supported extensive pastoralism have not returned. Some landscapes will be managed by fire, prescribed or otherwise, rather than by livestock, and the honest planning question is which ones.
Traditional management is not automatically good management. Grazing at the wrong intensity degrades soil and vegetation. Dead wood has real ecological value as habitat and nutrient return, so clearing everything is neither affordable nor desirable. The target is heterogeneity, not tidiness, and the difference matters because a tidiness objective is easier to inspect and will therefore be what a scheme measures.
Abandonment is not the only mechanism, and the wrong diagnosis produces the wrong instrument. France's Gironde fires ran through highly connected planted pine, which is a product of intensification rather than abandonment. Both produce the same fatal property, which is landscape scale continuity, by opposite routes. A grazing subsidy is the correct instrument for one and irrelevant to the other, and a European scheme designed for the Mediterranean case will do little in the Landes.
Adaptation evaluation in this area currently reports hectares treated, which is an output and tells you almost nothing.
Persistence after payment ends. Whether the practice continues, on what proportion of enrolled land, three years after the scheme changes. This is the only real test and it is the one nobody funds.
Who is doing it, and how old they are. A scheme delivered entirely by people over sixty is a scheme with a known expiry date, and that is visible at enrolment.
Whether the holding would be viable without the payment. If it would not, the scheme is a rural income transfer with a fuel management justification. That may be a perfectly good policy, and it should be argued for as one rather than evaluated as fire prevention.
Fire behaviour in treated and untreated landscapes under comparable weather. Difficult, because comparable weather is rare and the counterfactual is unobservable, but not impossible with enough seasons and enough sites, and it is the question the whole programme rests on.
These are field questions, answered by going to the holdings and asking, over years. The same argument about pilots and scaling applies here: Europe has demonstrated that grazing reduces fuel loads. What it has not established is whether anybody will keep doing it.
The Lab works on this in climate and ecosystems and regenerative agriculture, through field research designed around the people who would have to sustain a practice rather than the practice itself.
If you are designing a landscape fire programme and need to know whether it will still be running in 2032, tell us what you need to know.
This is an independent insight piece by Transitions Lab. For the Lab's applied work, see Climate & Ecosystems and Regenerative Agriculture & Land Systems. See also Europe Has Enough Demonstrations on why the pilot result is not adoption evidence, and Distance, Work, Reward on schemes that end when the payment does. To discuss a study, see Contact.