Reacción a "Wildfires in 2025 burned more than one million hectares across the European Union, with nearly half of that area located on the Iberian Peninsula"

The report indicates that records for burned area were broken in 2025. However, it is worth noting that the reference period is relatively short, as it only includes data from the 21st century. In the 1990s, for example, nearly half a million hectares burned in Spain, which far exceeds the figure for 2025. Therefore, although the claim of a record in burned area is certainly exaggerated, it is true that we are seeing an uptick in burned area. That is, we observed declines in burned area after the 1990s, due to increased investment in firefighting, improvements in training, and advancements in fire suppression strategies and tactics. However, that trend is reversing because today’s fires burn with greater intensity than in previous decades: there is increasingly more fuel (i.e., greater connectivity between forest areas), coupled with climate change that dries out vegetation and increases atmospheric instability. It is true that, at over 40,000 hectares, the Uña de Quintana fire has become the largest fire in Spain since ministerial statistics began in 1968. These data confirm that we are entering an era of fires that cannot be extinguished, as we warned several years ago.

The report focuses on protected areas and demonstrates how they are being disproportionately affected by fires: protected areas account for 19% of the land area but represent 39% of the burned area in the European Union. This necessitates a rethinking of the management of these protected areas and the incorporation of the growing risk they pose from the perspective of wildfires. The type of vegetation most affected in Spain was scrubland, which accounted for nearly half of the burned area, followed by broadleaf forests (such as oak, chestnut, etc.) and holm oak forests, which together make up more than 15% of the burned area. These data once again debunk the eco-myth that eucalyptus and pine trees are primarily responsible for the burned area. What we have seen this year is merely a preview of the future that awaits us if we continue to neglect fuel management: climate change is becoming increasingly intense and leaves little room for inaction. Studies indicate that we can significantly reduce the likelihood of catastrophic fires, as has already been done in other parts of the world, if we implement preventive management on approximately 5% of forest land.