Northern France is on fire again. Land-use choices, not just weather, decide how badly.

At 14:08 UTC on 15 July 2026, France 24's Spotlight programme aired an interview with Johan Sjöström, a senior research scientist at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, on the wildfire season now scarring northern France. Sjöström's argument cut past the weather graphic: what is burning is, in large part, a choice Europeans have made about how to organise the countryside around their villages, roads, and reservoirs. Treat that as the news, not the smoke.

The thesis is dry, evidence-led and uncomfortable for ministries that prefer to fund aerial firefighting fleets. Diversify the landscape, develop land management strategies, Sjöström told host François Picard. The implication is that repeated summer conflagrations across Gironde, Landes, and increasingly Brittany are not simply meteorological events the state responds to; they are the predicted output of a fifty-year project of conifer plantation, field consolidation, and rural depopulation. Europe's twenty-first-century fire bills sit inside that history, and so does Europe's twenty-first-century policy response, or the lack of one.

The runway the cameras do not show

The leading face of any European fire season is the air tanker, the orange-clad firefighter, the road closed because the autoroute is burning. The face behind that is a hectare count. France recorded its worst wildfire year on record in 2022, with roughly 30,000 hectares burned on the Gironde coastline alone, and again in 2023 across the same arc of pine plantations. The land those flames crossed is overwhelmingly the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century choices: vast, single-species Pinus pinaster blocks planted to stabilise sand dunes and produce resin, then inherited by a state that lacked the labour force to thin them and a market that lacked the price to harvest them.

A monoculture forest burns the way a flat timber yard burns: hot, fast, and in columns of resin-rich smoke that no tanker can douse in the first hours. Sjöström's reference point is the Nordic and Baltic fire record, where windier summers and longer daylight have always been a constraint, and where a mix of broadleaf, wet ground, and active cutting produces a landscape that resists, rather than invites, crown fire. The structural point is not that southern France should look like Småland, but that the design variables, species mix, road density, grazing pressure, harvest cycles, are policy choices Brussels and Paris can change on a six-year horizon if they choose to.

What Brussels already says, and why it does not move the dirt

The European Union has been gesturing at this for a decade. The 2021 EU Forest Strategy set a binding back-looped target of planting three billion trees by 2030, and a parallel commitment to biodiversity-rich, climate-resilient forests; the 2023 Nature Restoration Law added targets for rewilding and habitat heterogeneity that, read carefully, point exactly where Sjöström is pointing. Read operationally, the funding stream is small and the political capital spent on it is smaller. Forest policy in France remains, constitutionally and culturally, a national competence. The Common Agricultural Policy doles out area payments that go overwhelmingly to the largest, most consolidated, and most fire-prone holdings in the southwest.

The result is the now-familiar gap between a technical diagnosis EU institutions publish and the silvicultural reality on a Gironde parish council. Europe has produced the right plan to its front pages; it has not yet diverted a meaningful share of CAP pillar two money, or cohesion funds, into the unglamorous work of cutting fire roads, restoring oak and chestnut understorey in the Landes, subsidising prescribed burning as the Portuguese and Catalans now do routinely, and paying smallholders to maintain the bocage bunds and hedgerows that held Brittany together until the second world war and that air photos now show have disappeared by half in the past sixty years.

What the critics say, and what they get right

The pushback is real and should be heard. Insurance industry analysts argue that the dominant driver of fire damage across southern Europe is still a year-on-year rise in fire-weather days, the days when temperature, humidity, and wind align to make any vegetation burn. Land-use legacy matters, the argument goes, but it is dwarfed by a warming climate; prescribing silvicultural reform is a way for politically exposed ministries to look active while the actual policy lever is decarbonisation. A second critique, sharper and more local, holds that the diversify the landscape framing risks being read by farmers and forest owners as a top-down conservationist instruction to stop them from planting Pinus pinaster or to cull their maquis for rare birds. Both critiques land. Neither forecloses the policy.

The clean version of Sjöström's case is that landscape diversification is the cheapest insurance policy Europe can write against a climate risk it cannot fully price. It is additional to deep emissions cuts, not a substitute. It is additional to a strengthened EU civil protection mechanism, not a workaround. The cost is paid in hectares, in headage, in capital works on forest tracks that win no ribbon cuttings. The benefit is paid in hectares that do not burn when a heat dome parks over Lyon in mid-July, and in firefighter shifts that do not stack up to two weeks of twenty-hour days for volunteers drafted from five hundred kilometres away.

What to watch in the next fire season

Three things will tell whether the Sjöström diagnosis has any traction. First, whether the next revision of France's Plan national d'adaptation au changement climatique attaches a budget line and a hectare target to landscape diversification, rather than restating principle. Second, whether the European Commission's mid-term review of the CAP, due in 2027, shifts at least a portion of pillar two money toward fire-resistant silviculture in the Atlantic and Mediterranean biogeographical regions. Third, whether insurance pricing starts to read fire-risk zoning in land-use terms, what is planted within two hundred metres of a house, rather than only in distance-to-station terms. None of this is exotic; all of it is being asked for, in language close to Sjöström's, by European fire scientists who have run out of patience with aerial-bomb fire politics.

The honest answer, this summer, is that Europe remains better at publishing landscape diagnoses than at implementing them. Whether 2026 becomes the season when the gap closes depends on decisions taken in offices, not forests, between now and the first autumn rains.

This article gives more weight to the landscape-mismanagement framing than to the meteorology-only framing because the sources carry the stronger evidentiary case; it acknowledges that climate-change physics is the necessary background condition without which no land-use policy would be sufficient.

Sources

• France 24, Spotlight, "Following years of wildfires, Europe must 'diversify landscapes, develop land management strategies'"
• European Commission, EU Forest Strategy 2021, official text
• European Parliament, Nature Restoration Law (Regulation EU 2024/1991)
• Copernicus Emergency Management Service, European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), 2022–2025 annual fire reports

Desk note, Monexus frames the French fire story as a land-use story first, weather second, because the Sweden-based research scientist at the centre of the wire is making that argument, and because repeating the meteorology-only line would amount to restating a decade of EU press releases.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52021DC0572
• https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32024R1991
• https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/about-effis/technical-background