Spain, France, and Greece are simultaneously under active wildfire emergency as of July 6, a convergence that has prompted the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism to deploy 22 firefighting aircraft — the largest emergency aviation response in the mechanism's history. [1] It is a record that demonstrates two things at once: European solidarity works, and European prevention policy does not.

Spain's blazes span multiple provinces, with a fire burning in Girona since July 3 that has destroyed nearly 2,200 hectares in the northeastern Catalonia region. [2] France faces the most concentrated evacuation crisis: fires in the foothills of the French Pyrénées, near Perpignan and the Spanish border, have scorched the equivalent of approximately 6,500 football pitches and forced 10,000 people from their homes. [1] In Greece, a fire burning near Thessaloniki triggered indoor shelter advisories for several suburban communities due to toxic smoke from a burning recycling plant, with a second blaze active west of Athens. [2]

Portugal is also actively affected. A fire burning in Vouzela in central Portugal since July 2 has consumed approximately 12,000 hectares in three days, requiring more than 1,200 firefighters, 400 vehicles, and 15 aircraft in concentrated suppression. [1] The EU mechanism has mobilized aircraft and ground teams from Sweden, Cyprus, Italy, and Spain to reinforce Portuguese operations, in addition to the deployments covering Spain, France, and Greece. [3]

The 22-aircraft figure for the combined deployment represents the EU's rescEU firefighting fleet — a reserve capacity established after the 2018 and 2021 fire seasons made clear that individual member states could not protect each other without a shared pool. The mechanism works as designed: rapid cross-border asset sharing within days of activation. What it cannot do is substitute for the prescribed burn programs, firebreak networks, and land-management regimes that reduce ignition risk and fuel load before the fire season starts. [3]

A third major European heat wave is arriving this week. Conditions for new ignitions across southern Europe are worsening during active suppression operations in all four countries. [1] Firefighting aircraft operating in this environment face not only the fires they are assigned to but the risk of new starts in terrain they have not pre-positioned for. The record deployment is already being stretched across a widening front.

The prevention-budget comparison across Spain, France, and Greece since the previous record fire season of 2021 tells a consistent story: emergency response budgets have grown alongside the EU mechanism's deployment capacity, while national prevention budgets for prescribed burns, forest management, and rural firebreak maintenance have stagnated or contracted. [3] The EU funds response through its crisis mechanism. It does not fund prevention through a comparable instrument. Each summer's record deployment reflects the gap between what prevention spending was not done in the preceding eleven months and what emergency spending must now accomplish in days.

Combined, the active fires across the four affected countries have scorched more than 19,000 hectares as of July 6 — an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, burned in less than a week. [2] The EU's 22-aircraft fleet will suppress portions of those fires. The question that the record deployment cannot answer is what the 2027 deployment will need to look like if the prevention gap is not addressed this winter.

Europe has built a remarkable emergency response architecture. It has not built a prevention policy to match it. The record deployment is the cost of that asymmetry expressed in jet fuel and pilot hours. [3]

-- DARA OSEI, London