Expert: Europe's wildfire crisis demands nature-based solutions, not just emergency response

In a France 24 interview, host Carys Garland welcomes Alexander Held, Senior Expert of the Resilience Programme for Integrated Fire Management. Held explains that Europe's escalating wildfire crisis is exposing the limits of an approach centred on emergency suppression rather than long-term resilience.

He acknowledges that the European Union has significantly improved its capacity to coordinate firefighting operations. However, the EU still intervenes only after the fact, once wildfires have already become uncontrollable. According to Held, the core challenge is no longer primarily about firefighting; it is about landscape governance. Climate change may intensify conditions for extreme fires, yet the scale and destructiveness of these events are also shaped by decades of land abandonment, fuel accumulation, shifting agricultural practices, and political incentives that favour highly visible emergency responses over less visible preventive measures.

Held argues for nature-based solutions and a fundamental shift in how land is treated. The land treats us the way we treat the land, he says, suggesting that long-term prevention requires restoring landscapes, supporting sustainable land use, and rethinking policy priorities. Instead of simply boosting firefighting capacity, Europe needs to invest in managing vegetation, revitalising rural areas, and creating conditions that reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires.