Climate skeptics and right-wing commentators have circulated social media charts suggesting Europe is experiencing an unusually quiet wildfire season in 2026, including former University of Alabama geochemist Matthew Wielicki, who was recently appointed to lead the US Global Change Research Program under the Trump administration. Conservative peer Matt Ridley shared data from Our World In Data showing 2026 as having the smallest cumulative burned area for this time of year since 2012, a claim that spread widely among prominent right-wing figures. However, experts and fact-checkers have identified significant methodological flaws in these comparisons.
The misleading charts rely on data from the Global Wildfire Information System, which categorizes “Europe” to include all countries on the continent, encompassing the entirety of Russia. Russia accounts for approximately 74 percent of the area in this geographic definition and typically represents 80 to 90 percent of burned area in the dataset. In 2026, Russian fires are substantially below average, which skews the overall European figures downward and masks the severe wildfire activity occurring in western Europe. Dr. Calum Cunningham from the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre characterized such claims as “highly misleading,” noting that aggregating fire activity across such a climatically diverse region obscures the actual conditions in regions currently experiencing fires.
When examining data specific to the European Union using the European Forest Fire Information System, which excludes Russia and filters for forest fires rather than intentional agricultural burns, a starkly different picture emerges. As of late July, the EU’s burned area stands at nearly 435,000 hectares, making 2026 the second-worst year for this time of year in the available dataset, surpassed only by 2022. France has set a new modern record for area burned, with cumulative burned area exceeding its previous record by more than 24,700 hectares as of late July. Spain’s wildfire season ranks among the worst on record, with burned area nearly five times the average for this period.
The human toll has been substantial, with more than a third of a million people displaced across southwestern Europe. In France, more than 220,000 people were evacuated due to the Gironde fire west of Bordeaux, described as potentially the nation’s largest peacetime evacuation. In Spain, nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes by fires concentrated near Madrid that burned an area more than twice the size of the capital itself. An impending heatwave has raised concerns that the fires could intensify further in coming days. Both French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez have characterized the fires as expressions of climate change, while UK, French, and Spanish governments issued joint statements describing the summer’s wildfires as a national security emergency for Europe.
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