Wildfires are preventable. So why does the Iberian Peninsula keep burning?

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.