BRUSSELS — Exhausted firefighters. Traumatized evacuees. Charred villages. Red horizons, all flames and smoke. 

The dramatic images from wildfires tearing through Spain and Portugal year after year have become a mainstay of Europe’s increasingly blistering summers, a symbol of the devastation wreaked by climate change. 

But while global warming fuels the flames, the Iberian Peninsula isn’t destined to turn into a fiery hellscape every year. Experts say that most of the damage is, in fact, preventable — if only authorities at regional, national and European levels would act. 

“Climate change plays a role here, that’s for sure, but it’s not the main cause, and this cannot be used as an excuse for what governments must do in terms of prevention,” said Jordi Vendrell​, director of the Pau Costa Foundation, a nonprofit focused on wildfire management. 

This year’s fire season is already the worst on record. Across the European Union, blazes have consumed more than 1 million hectares so far this year — an area larger than Cyprus. Most of that land has burned over the past two weeks in the Iberian Peninsula, where at least six people have died.

The scale of this year’s disaster has kicked off an unusual reckoning in both countries as to why Spanish and Portuguese citizens are exposed to such a deadly threat each year. 

“My house, my neighbor’s house, my entire town of Castrocalbón has gone up in flames because our authorities are incompetent,” 74-year-old Josefina Vidal cried out at a protest in the central Spanish city of León on Monday. Across the border in Portugal on Tuesday, mourners at a firefighter’s funeral declared Prime Minister Luís Montenegro persona non grata. 

Politicians on both sides of the border are keen to avoid being held responsible, and are taking pains to blame the fires on uncontrollable factors like climate change and arson, or past decisions taken by their political rivals. At best, the debate centers on firefighting resources. 

Yet experts say that preventing destructive blazes is both simpler and cheaper than fighting them. And the conditions that create firestorms are largely due to how countries manage — or rather, don’t manage — their land.

The climate factor

That’s not to say climate change isn’t playing a role. 

The global increase in temperatures, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, does not spark fires. But it creates conditions for flames to spread with ease: More intense and frequent heat waves — such as the searing heat Spain and Portugal endured in recent weeks — dry out soils and plants, rendering forests and land more flammable. 

Scientists stress that while halting global warming is crucial to avoid even worse heat waves and droughts, governments must also urgently minimize the risk of climate-fueled disasters.

In the case of fires, that mostly means ensuring there’s less stuff for flames to feast on. 

While climate change is ratcheting up fire risk, “the fires we’re seeing are the result of decades of rural exodus and the absence of forest management,” said Arantza Pérez Oleaga, vice dean of Spain’s Official College of Forestry Engineers. 

Leaving the land

As more and more farmers and shepherds migrated to cities in recent decades, uncontrolled vegetation took over the forests, meadows, orchards and cropland they once managed. An estimated 2.3 million hectares of Spanish land are now abandoned. 

This provides abundant fuel for catastrophic wildfires. The amount of biomass in Spain has surged by 160 percent over the past 50 years, said Eduardo Rojas Briales, forest expert at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. 

Halting land abandonment is the key to preventing fires, experts say. Yet currently, with the rural population aging and struggling to make a living, it’s a trend that’s expected to continue. 

“We need a strong primary sector,” said Víctor Resco de Dios, forest engineering professor at the University of Lleida. Crops such as olive orchards “traditionally served as firebreaks,” he added. “Now we have the problem that with rural abandonment, crops are less common.” 

The wild shrublands and young forests that sprang up in their place may look like land returning to its natural state. But Resco de Dios says that the romantic “Disney ecology” vision many Europeans have of untouched nature is not only a fantasy — it’s actively dangerous. 

“We need to make people understand that cutting trees is not an ecological crime,” he said. “On the contrary … if we plant trees and then we forget about them, then we’re just planting the fires that we’ll have in 20 or 30 years from now.” 

Forestry experts, scientists and even conservationists agree: Letting Europe’s nature grow wild, without active management, is fueling the devastating fires. 

Prevention, they say, means creating diverse landscapes, felling trees to create fire breaks, and developing a rural policy that ensures farmers and shepherds can make a living. 

Crucially, it also means letting some fires burn, as long as they don’t spin out of control — ending what experts call a counterproductive policy of extinguishing all flames. In the Mediterranean, “our landscapes, they burn in the past, they are burning in the present, and they must burn in the future,” Vendrell said​. 

Prevention paradox

Yet political debates about fire management tend to focus on fighting the flames when the land is already burning. In Spain, for example, conservative-led regions and the left-wing central government spent the past week trading blame over firefighting resources. 

But governments more readily invest in firefighting equipment than prevention. Spain’s firefighting budget is double that of its prevention spending, even though preventing fires is much cheaper than fighting them. 

“If we want firefighters to be able to stop a fire, of course, they have to have the means,” said Resco de Dios. “But … they cannot do their job, even if they have all the resources in the world, because the landscapes that we have do not allow them to work.” 

Still, the task governments are facing isn’t easy, or cheap. Halting land abandonment will take significant long-term investment in rural communities, said Pérez Oleaga. 

Stimulating demand for material such as wood is essential, she added. “There is a reason why there are fewer fires in places like Soria or the Basque Country,” where “the forests are pruned and managed because you still have sawmills and other businesses that make a living from the forests.”

The Spanish environment ministry, which also oversees policies related to demographic change, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Portugal’s environment ministry blamed the fires on extreme weather, but said that the country was planning to invest €246 million a year until 2050 in measures to boost forestry industries and land management. 

There are signs that fire prevention is getting more attention amid growing frustration over how authorities handle the fires. On Thursday, Spain’s special prosecutor for environmental issues opened an investigation into the lack of forest management plans in connection with the fires. 

But all experts interviewed acknowledged that politicians have few incentives to take preventive action, given that the results are often not visible for years or decades after the next election. 

“For a politician, the calculation is simple,” said Pérez Oleaga. “You can take a picture next to the firefighting plane you bought with EU funds, but you don’t get to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony when you use public cash to clean up a forest.”