标签： Europe

PARIS – For the third time in less than a century, Western Europe’s largest man-made forest is recovering from a devastating wildfire that has laid bare the combined threats of accelerating climate change and centuries-old industrial forestry practices. The massive blaze swept through 40,000 hectares of Les Landes’ pine plantations – an area four times the size of Paris – leaving a trail of ash and charred tree trunks across the 10,000-square-kilometer timber landscape in southwest France. The region has already weathered deadly catastrophic fires: an 82-fatality blaze in 1949, and another large destructive fire in 2022 that displaced 37,000 people and destroyed 320 square kilometers of woodland.

The Les Landes forest was not a natural ecosystem. Its origins trace to an 1857 law enacted under Napoleon III’s Second French Empire, which ordered the drainage of the region’s unproductive marshy heathlands to create an industrial timber and resin production hub. Municipalities were directed to plant dense, uniform rows of maritime pine, displacing local peasant communities and traditional sheep herding practices that had defined the region for generations. Today, the forest remains focused primarily on timber output, carrying enormous economic weight for southwest France: the sector supports 60,000 local jobs and generates more than 10 billion euros ($11.5 billion) in annual revenue. More than 90% of the forest is privately owned, with 75% of that land held by just 20% of owners, while the National Forest Office and local governments manage the remaining public portion.

While maritime pine boasts natural fire resistance via its thick bark and ability to regenerate after small blazes, the monoculture structure of the Les Landes plantations creates a tinderbox waiting to ignite, forestry experts explain. Unlike diverse mixed forests that combine conifers and broadleaf trees, single-species pine stands lack layered vegetation that shades and cools the forest floor. In a healthy mixed forest, less than 3% of solar radiation reaches the ground, keeping soil moist and retaining water-rich humus that prevents fires from taking hold. In Les Landes, the uniform rows of closely spaced pines leave soil exposed, baking it dry and depleting most areas of humus entirely. Fallen pine needles accumulate in thick, flammable layers that can smolder for weeks after a main blaze passes, while heat-ignited resinous pine cones can be carried hundreds of meters by wind to spark new spot fires.

Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, has amplified these existing vulnerabilities: rising temperatures and prolonged droughts created the ideal conditions for the 2025 blaze to spread out of control. As fire crews and local residents work for weeks to extinguish stubborn smoldering embers that repeatedly reignite, the disaster has sparked a national reckoning in France over how to adapt forest management to a hotter, drier climate worsened by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use.

President Emmanuel Macron has called for replanting the burned areas to create an entirely different type of forest, noting that shifting conditions driven by climate change, plus growing pressure from expanding housing and tourism, require a fundamental break from past practices.

Experts have put forward a slate of potential reforms to reduce wildfire risk. Geographer Arthur Guérin-Turcq, who authored a report on the 2022 Les Landes wildfires, argues that the monoculture structure allows fires to spread unimpeded all the way to populated villages, making it essential to create buffer zones of less fire-prone land around settlements – such as wetlands, active farmland, or low-risk commercial spaces. Many forestry specialists also advocate for introducing broadleaf trees, which retain more soil moisture and reduce flammability, into the plantation landscape. Local fire defense leaders are pushing for larger, well-maintained firebreaks, even if that means sacrificing up to 2,000 hectares of forest to prevent catastrophic total loss. Still, Guérin-Turcq notes that transforming the entire Les Landes landscape faces major barriers, including the region’s poor, thin soils that are not well-suited to many broadleaf species.

Overhauling management of the forest will require complex negotiations between private landowners, the timber industry, and national and local public authorities. Nicolas Lafon, president of the Southwest Foresters’ Association which represents most private landowners, emphasized that forest owners are the primary victims of the disaster, not the cause, and called for national government to commit sufficient funding to support long-term reform. “Forest owners reject any attempt to portray them as being responsible for a disaster of which they are the primary victims,” he said. “They now expect the French government, elected officials, and all public stakeholders to implement a truly ambitious, coherent, and long-term national forest policy.” Lafon added that any transition away from monoculture in high-risk areas will require financial compensation for landowners to offset lost revenue.

The national rethink extends beyond forest structure to wildlife protection: an online petition calling for a temporary ban on hunting in recently burned areas, where surviving animal populations are already severely stressed, has gathered more than 300,000 signatures as of reporting.

LEGE-CAP FERRET, France — Nearly a week after a devastating wildfire swept through southwestern France’s Atlantic coastal region, firefighting teams continued mop-up operations Friday to extinguish the last smoldering hot spots of a blaze that has already scorched an area four times larger than the entire city of Paris and displaced tens of thousands of residents. Since igniting in Bordeaux’s Gironde department, the inferno has consumed 42,000 hectares — equivalent to roughly 162 square miles — of prime pine forest and popular tourist resort areas, but the blaze has not expanded its reach for several consecutive days, marking a key turning point in the battle against the disaster.

Meteorological shifts have given exhausted fire crews a much-needed reprieve: overnight cooling temperatures and rising humidity levels across the region have reduced the risk of flare-ups and eased the intense strain on first responders. With the fire line holding, teams have shifted their focus to extinguishing persistent hot spots hidden in forest undergrowth and vegetation along the region’s iconic fine-sand dunes.

This wildfire is one of dozens sweeping across Europe amid an unprecedented record-breaking hot summer, which has created tinder-dry conditions that have accelerated the spread of blazes from the Atlantic coastline all the way to the eastern Mediterranean. On Thursday alone, countries across the continent were locked in wildfire response: the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Greece and Turkey all reported active large blazes requiring urgent firefighting deployments.

In the Gironde region, the initial outbreak forced 224,000 people to evacuate their homes and businesses to escape the advancing flames. This week, local authorities have gradually lifted evacuation orders, allowing more than 144,000 displaced residents to return to their properties.

French officials struck a tone of cautious optimism on Friday, warning that while the situation is stabilized, the threat is not fully over. “It’s stabilized, but not totally stopped,” French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told RTL radio in an interview Friday. “Hot spots remain.” Thousands of firefighters remain fully mobilized across the fire zone to respond to any new outbreaks and extinguish remaining embers.

In a show of international solidarity amid the crisis, Nunez announced via a social media post that Ukraine will send 70 trained civil security personnel and 10 specialized firefighting vehicles to France in the coming days to reinforce local response teams and support ongoing containment efforts.

As out-of-control wildfires continue to scorch vast swathes of Spain and France this week, two independent scientific studies released Thursday deliver a clear, data-backed conclusion: human-caused climate change has directly amplified the extreme fire-conducive weather driving these catastrophic blazes, and has drastically raised wildfire risk across Southern Europe over the past eight years.

The first analysis, from international scientific collaborative World Weather Attribution (WWA), found that anthropogenic climate change made the record-breaking extreme inferno conditions in Spain 20 times more likely to occur, while doubling the odds of dangerous fire weather for the ongoing blazes in France. Looking at a longer 26-year warming trend, the report notes extreme fire risk probability has tripled in Spain and risen by 40% in France. WWA conducted its rapid assessment while fires were still actively spreading across the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France, meaning the work has not yet completed formal peer review — the traditional gold standard for scientific publication. But WWA lead researcher Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, emphasized the team uses widely accepted methodological approaches, and many of the group’s rapid analyses are later peer-reviewed and published in major academic journals.

Otto pointed to Spain’s unique combination of risk factors that turned dry heat into unprecedented fire danger: the country is currently experiencing its hottest summer on record, following an unusually wet January that spurred dense vegetation growth. A severe, prolonged drought then hit, drying out that excess plant life to create massive amounts of ready-to-burn wildfire fuel. Additional risk stems from widespread land abandonment in parts of Spain, which leaves overgrown, unmanaged vegetation to dry out and increase fire severity. In France, the Bordeaux region — one of the areas hardest hit by the current blazes — has large, dense pine forests that burn intensely once ignited, Otto added.

To quantify climate change’s impact, Otto’s team compared current fire weather severity — measured across four key factors: air temperature, drought levels, humidity, and wind speed — to historical regional data, and modeled what conditions would look like if the planet had not warmed by 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since the pre-industrial era.

A separate, pre-planned study published Thursday in the journal *Scientific Reports* adds broader long-term context to the current crisis. Lead author Raúl Cordero, a climate scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, found the average annual number of extreme fire-prone weather days across Southern Europe has more than doubled since the mid-20th century, jumping from roughly 10 days per year in earlier decades to around 25 days annually today. Not only are extreme fire days more frequent, Cordero’s analysis found they are also 50% more intense than the average recorded between 1981 and 2010.

Cordero’s research also highlights a troubling trend: from the 1980s through 2018, better fire suppression and land management practices led to steady reductions in the number of wildfires and total acreage burned across Southern Europe. But those hard-won gains have been completely wiped out by the rapid acceleration of climate-driven fire risk. “It doesn’t matter how many resources or how much money you have, you just cannot stop the propagation of a fire when the weather is so extreme,” Cordero explained. “The climate forcing is so extreme nowadays that it’s just amazing.”

Independent fire and climate scientists not involved in either study say the findings confirm long-held understanding of climate change’s wildfire impact. “This study makes sense and provides numbers to confirm what fire scientists already knew,” said Jacob Bendix, a fire researcher at Syracuse University. “We have always known that fires ignite more easily and spread more explosively under conditions of extreme heat and drought. And we’ve known for decades that extreme heat and drought are becoming more common due to anthropogenic climate change. So the general outline of these events, if not all the details, was tragically predictable.”

John Abatzaglou, a fire scientist at the University of California Merced, added that the research underscores that climate change is not a distant threat. “These findings make clear that climate change is not just a future problem, it’s already here,” he said.

Otto stressed that the solution to worsening wildfire risk requires urgent action to cut fossil fuel use. “We need to stop burning fossil fuels,” she said. “Because as long as we keep burning fossil fuels, temperatures will increase globally. And that will mean that these fire weather conditions will get worse and worse and worse. And there are hard limits to what we can adapt to.”

A historic climate-fueled drought has pushed water levels in the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river, to their lowest point in decades, triggering cascading energy disruptions, shutting down key nuclear infrastructure, and halting shipping across multiple Central and Eastern European nations this summer. What began as a gradual drop in water levels amid months of below-average rainfall and a sustained record-breaking heatwave has escalated into a full-blown energy and transportation crisis, with implications that underscore the growing vulnerability of European infrastructure to accelerating climate change.

Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, announced last week that the country’s only nuclear power plant, the Soviet-era Paks facility, will be forced into a complete, temporary shutdown for the first time in its history. The plant relies on Danube water to cool its reactors, but receding waters have left the facility’s water suction nozzles unable to reach the river’s surface. Magyar warned that the combination of the Paks shutdown and ongoing heatwave, which will keep temperatures hovering around 37°C for a full week, could push Hungary’s national energy supply into a “critical” state starting Monday.

To avoid a total grid collapse, the prime minister has called on all Hungarian residents to cut back on high-energy activities during peak evening demand hours between 17:00 and 22:00, including electric vehicle charging and heavy use of air conditioning. He added that authorities are also preparing a contingency plan for rotational power outages if voluntary conservation fails to balance grid supply and demand, and the government is currently compiling a list of commercial and industrial users whose electricity and water consumption can be restricted if necessary.

Hungary is far from alone in facing crisis. Neighboring Romania has already shut down one of its two operational nuclear reactors at the Cernavoda power plant, which generates roughly 20% of the country’s total electricity output. The 706-megawatt unit was taken offline earlier this week due to the catastrophic drop in Danube levels, and state power firm Nuclearelectrica was working frantically late this week to prevent the shutdown of the remaining reactor. If the second unit goes offline, Romania will join Hungary in losing 100% of its nuclear power generation temporarily, a devastating blow to national energy security. Official hydrological data from Romania’s National Institute of Hydrology shows that average July flow of the Danube at the country’s entry point is 4,700 cubic meters per second; this week, that figure dropped to less than a third of the normal level at 1,600 cubic meters per second, with forecasts calling for further declines to 1,500 cubic meters per second by next Tuesday.

The current crisis is the product of months of abnormal weather that has gripped much of Europe, a continent that the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirms is warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth. Climate change has amplified the frequency and intensity of summer heatwaves, dried up continental water reserves, and increased the risk of catastrophic wildfires across the region. This summer, persistent drought and high temperatures have pushed Danube levels to their lowest point in 30 years across most of the river basin, with some Serbian hydrologists noting levels have not been this low in 50 to 60 years. Low rainfall this spring combined with summer’s extreme heat has compounded the problem, according to experts, and no significant recovery in water levels is expected before mid-September.

Alongside energy disruptions, the falling river has all but halted commercial and passenger shipping along large stretches of the Danube. In Bulgaria, shipping has completely stopped, and earlier this week border police were forced to evacuate 186 passengers from the Viking Ullur river cruise ship after the vessel ran aground near the border city of Vidin. Stranded passengers faced dwindling food and water supplies after the ship could not dock in Vidin, and a secondary rescue vessel initially struggled to reach the grounded craft due to shallow waters. “I have never heard of such low levels over the years. There has certainly not been a similar situation since 1990,” Ivan Zhekov, head of river supervision at Bulgaria’s maritime administration agency, told local news outlet BTA. The low waters have even exposed vast stretches of riverbed around the Bulgarian-Romanian border, leaving dozens of small boats stranded on dry ground near the Calafat-Vidin cross-border bridge.

While the crisis has brought severe disruption, the receding waters have also uncovered rare long-submerged artifacts and natural remains. In Croatia, the wreck of a sunken Hungarian cargo ship has resurfaced, while in Serbia’s Prahovo region, the hulk of a World War II German warship that had been submerged for decades is now fully exposed. Most remarkably, a resident of the Bulgarian city of Ruse discovered well-preserved mammoth bones on the exposed riverbed, including a lower jaw, two tusks, and what experts believe to be a rib bone.

The Danube, which stretches 2,857 kilometers across 10 European countries, is a critical transportation artery and key water source for power generation and agriculture across Central and Eastern Europe. Its tributaries, including the Sava and Tisa in Serbia, are also hitting record low levels this summer, compounding regional stress. Beyond the Danube basin, the broader European climate crisis continues to escalate: extreme fire weather is spreading toward central Europe, after France and Spain experienced some of the most intense and widespread wildfires on record in recent weeks, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. Greece and Turkey remain the worst-affected countries for wildfire activity this season.