In August 2025, as fires tore through Portugal and two of its Canadair planes broke down, the government asked Spain for aerial support. Spain could not help. Its own resources were already overwhelmed by simultaneous fires across the Iberian Peninsula. Morocco stepped in and sent two aircraft instead.
That situation - a European neighbour stretched beyond its capacity, a North African partner stepping into the breach - shows what Mediterranean fire management looks like today, and what it needs to become.
The numbers from recent seasons are stark. In 2025, the worst wildfire year on record, more than one million hectares burned across EU member states, the highest total since systematic records began. Compound hot-and-dry events, the meteorological conditions that turn forests into kindling, have increased by 35 to 45 per cent across the Mediterranean basin since 2000. The forests that once recovered between seasons are now burning before they can.
Scientists are unambiguous on what is driving this: not a cycle that will correct itself, but a structural shift in the conditions under which the region now exists.
The political response, however, has not yet caught up with the physical reality. Mediterranean governments have treated fire largely as a national emergency, something to be managed within borders, by national fleets, with bilateral assistance called in when things get bad enough.
That instinct is understandable, but it is increasingly untenable. Chemical plants, port facilities and energy infrastructure, concentrated along the industrialised corridors of the Mediterranean rim, carry risks that cross borders faster than any national emergency plan can be activated. The sea that has connected these cultures for millennia now connects their vulnerabilities in ways that our countries cannot adequately address alone.
The more fundamental problem is that Mediterranean fire management has been reactive by design. Too many responses begin when the fire is already visible, rather than when the conditions that produce it first become detectable. Satellite data, AI-assisted fire behaviour modelling and advanced early-warning analytics now make genuine anticipation possible - but only if the governance frameworks exist to let data, aircraft and expertise move across borders as quickly as the fires themselves.
Technology deployed within siloed national systems delivers a fraction of what it could deliver within a shared regional architecture.
Some initiatives are already moving in this direction. At the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), for example, we have just adopted the 2030 Action Plan on Civil Protection and Disaster Risk Management, which is designed to help build that architecture before the next crisis arrives, rather than improvise it once the fire is already burning. As the UfM brings together 43 member states, including the 27 EU countries and partners from the southern and eastern Mediterranean, it already provides a framework for cross-border cooperation.
The central ambition of the plan is interoperability between national systems: the capacity for a Moroccan aircraft to operate alongside a French Canadair under a Greek command structure without losing hours to incompatible protocols. That may sound administrative until you are inside a major fire. Convincing governments to pre-commit resources and authority to a regional framework when no fire is burning, when budget pressure is immediate and the risk feels abstract, is the political problem that no action plan resolves by itself.
The EU Civil Protection Mechanism has proven its value repeatedly in recent fire seasons, mobilising aerial and ground assets across borders with a speed that no national system acting alone could match. What the UfM adds is the partnership layer that makes that mechanism more effective: the southern and eastern Mediterranean governments that share the same fire geography, that have built their own capacities, and that need to be inside a common architecture rather than on its receiving end.
Proximity makes all this concrete. A forest fire in northern Tunisia threatens the same tourism economy, the same biodiversity, the same rural communities as a fire across the water in Sicily. A chemical plant blaze in a Mediterranean port sends its plume toward whichever city the wind favours. Fires, like drought and sea-level rise, accumulate across borders.
Bilateral solutions negotiated under pressure, when the smoke is already visible, have never been enough. What works is the preparation done in advance: shared intelligence systems, pre-positioned resources, the institutional trust that only years of sustained cooperation can build.
At a moment when international cooperation is being tested in ways not seen in decades, the temptation to treat shared problems as competitions over who bears the cost is real. The Mediterranean cannot afford it. Our countries share a sea, and the sea does not partition risk. The distances are too short, the exposure too intertwined. Forty-three governments have agreed to build something together here: frameworks, capacities, habits of cooperation that did not exist a decade ago. The harder question is whether political will holds in the months when no fire is burning.
That is the test this framework now faces, and I intend to spend the years ahead making sure it does not fail the people on all the shores of our shared sea.
Joan Borrell Mayeur is Deputy Secretary General for Stability and Resilience, Union for the Mediterranean