There have never been so many wildfires in the European Union since statistics first began being reported in 2006 with the launch of the ‘European Forest Fire Information System’ (EFFIS), implemented thanks to the European Copernicus programme. For the first time, fires burnt more than one million hectares since January 2025. The previous record was set in 2017, when 988,000 hectares were destroyed during the year.
Most of these losses have been recorded in Spain (over 411,000 hectares...