As the climate crisis fuels more intense and unpredictable wildfires, pushing them into new regions, firefighters are increasingly forced to make impossible triage decisions, rationing scarce resources and choosing which blazes to fight.
Operational Collapse Risk
César Alcaraz, an officer with Alicante’s provincial firefighters in Spain, recalls being ambushed by a fast-moving blaze in the late 1990s, with no water left and barely able to breathe. Nearly three decades later, he now understands the agonizing choices commanders face. “It’s not just about having more fires to fight, it’s the risk of operational collapse,” said Alcaraz, who works in the command center. “When two or three fires break out simultaneously, we are forced to make immediate triage decisions.”
Deadly wildfires have engulfed western Europe this month, the grim consequence of a trio of heatwaves that have turned lush vegetation into dry tinder. France, Portugal, and Spain have each been torched by a record-breaking number of wildfires for this time of year, leaving an unprecedented area of France in flames and 13 people dead in Spain. The UK began the week with 19 separate wildfires, leading experts to warn of a “firewave” more widespread than ever before.
Global Impact and Air Quality
Across the Atlantic, smoke from 100 fires burning northern Ontario made Toronto the most polluted city in the world on Wednesday, before crossing the US border to choke New York. Far-reaching fumes from Canadian wildfires caused 82,000 early deaths in 2023, a study found last year, including 33,000 in the US and 22,000 in Europe. On Friday, the EU’s Copernicus agency said summer smoke was causing “extremely poor” air quality warnings in areas such as New Jersey, which hosts the World Cup final on Sunday.
The problem is not just the hectarage. The global trend in wildfire size has been toward fewer hectares of burnt land, largely because huge tracts of African savannah susceptible to fires are now fragmented by farmland. But where fires burn, they are often hotter, less predictable, and greater in number. Carbon pollution has raised global temperatures, and with more heat to dry out plants, small fires can more easily escalate into hellish infernos, spreading into areas previously less vulnerable, increasing danger at the wildland-urban interface.
Resource Scarcity in France and Spain
In France, extreme scenarios are forcing authorities to divide scarce resources. Firefighters tackled 250-300 fires simultaneously over the past three weeks, said Julien Marion, head of the civil protection agency, during a visit to the smouldering Fontainebleau forest. In Spain, firefighters used to dealing with a couple of blazes at a time say they struggle with an increase in number and strength. The situation has been worsened by recent wet winters and springs that allow vegetation to flourish, leaving more surplus fuel when it inevitably dries in summer, as well as the abandonment of farmland that once broke up flammable countryside.
“In the end, the response capacity is limited,” said Juan Caamaño, head of training at the Pau Costa Foundation, a nonprofit helping Northern Ireland and other cold regions prepare for worsening wildfires. “When we face these huge fires, these extreme events, it’s like trying to put firefighters on a beach to stop a tsunami.”
UK Wildfires and Changing Tactics
In the UK, where the threat of fires is more present in grass than in forests, blazes have broken out from cities to national parks this month. A wildfire that ripped through Walthamstow in east London last weekend, thought to have been caused by a falling tree hitting power cables, drew about 125 firefighters. Strong wind and dry vegetation helped it spread fast. “One of the alarming things I was seeing over the weekend was large parts of the country where the probability of sustained ignition was 100%,” said Dr Thomas Smith, a wildfire scientist at the London School of Economics.
The shift from fighting all fires to picking battles is “a very new thing for northern European countries”, said Smith, though not for the Mediterranean. “They’re having to change tactics when they fight fires, while we’re really struggling with strategic decisions.” Fresh in the memories of London’s firefighters is the wildfire that destroyed 18 houses in Wennington village during a ferocious heatwave in July 2022, the worst day for the London fire brigade since the second world war.
Staffing Cuts and Future Strains
The London fire brigade has since bought four all-terrain support vehicles, able to “pump and drive”, mobilized 34 times this year. They have also encouraged natural fire breaks by cutting grass near homes and businesses. Such advice has grown more pertinent as the number of firefighters has fallen. Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said crews had been stretched by staffing cuts – with 12,000 fewer firefighters in the UK today than in 2010 – resulting in more fires that grow out of control. “This is only going to get worse, and the government has to get a handle on it,” he said.
The strains are echoed globally. Fire seasons in North America and Australia are getting longer and increasingly coincide, hampering longstanding arrangements to share aircraft and firefighters. The overlap is expected to increase to between four and 29 days each year by 2050, a study found last year. While climate breakdown is the main driver of increasingly “synchronous” global fire seasons, natural variation often makes it worse. The return of El Niño has alarmed Australia and Indonesia because of the greater risk of fires.
Government Response and Policy
“The climate emergency kills,” said Pedro Sánchez, prime minister of Spain, during a visit to the advanced command post in Almería from which firefighters quelled one of the country’s deadliest blazes on record. “As a result, all levels of government and society as a whole must rise to the challenge before us.” Yet policies to cut carbon pollution in rich countries fall far short of what would be needed to stop the planet from heating 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Efforts to use fire to manage the land, such as controlled burns, are still considered novel in many countries, with exceptions in Canada and Australia.
In Europe, the cultural shift among firefighters has begun to trickle up into policy. In late June, EU member states approved a non-binding strategy to manage wildfire risk that encourages prescribed burning and more diverse landscapes. Its civil protection mechanism, allowing embattled member states to request firefighting support from neighbours, was increased this year by pre-emptive deployments. But, while the mechanism itself was “working perfectly”, firefighting teams were being deployed in extreme situations the likes of which they had never seen, said Caamaño. “I have the feeling that we’re always behind the emergency,” he said. “And it is the emergency that governs us, rather than us governing the emergency.”
