Claims circulating on social media by prominent climate skeptics that Europe is experiencing its quietest year for wildfires in 2026 have been challenged by fact-checkers and researchers.
The misleading claims stem from charts using data that encompass the entire European continent, including Russia and Siberia, where fire activity is significantly below average this year. Russia typically accounts for 74-90% of burned area in this broad European dataset, meaning a quiet Russian season masks severe wildfires elsewhere. The charts also include deliberately set agricultural fires, a declining practice across much of Europe. Prominent figures sharing these claims include former Conservative peer Matt Ridley, who posted on Twitter that 2026 was Europe’s quietest wildfire year, alongside climate skeptics Bjorn Lomborg and Matthew Wielicki, a geochemist recently appointed to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
Data from the European Forest Fire Information System, which focuses specifically on the 27 EU nations and excludes Russia, tells a starkly different story. As of late July, the EU has burned approximately 435,000 hectares, making 2026 the second-worst year for this time period since records began, surpassed only by 2022. France has experienced an unprecedented wildfire season, breaking its previous annual burned-area record by over 19,000 hectares within a single week in mid-July. The surge followed a record-breaking June heatwave that dried vegetation across the region. Spanish wildfires, concentrated near Madrid, have burned an area more than twice the size of the capital city and are tracking toward one of the worst seasons on record since 2006.
The humanitarian toll has been severe, with more than 220,000 people evacuated in France due to the Gironde fire west of Bordeaux, described as potentially the nation’s largest peacetime evacuation. Nearly 90,000 people were displaced in central Spain. An impending heatwave raised concerns about further deterioration. Government leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, characterized the fires as expressions of climate change, while UK, French, and Spanish governments jointly stated that the wildfires demonstrated climate change had become a national security emergency for Europe.
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