Homes gone. Harvests ruined. A tourist season wiped out. None of that is counted in Europe’s official wildfire bill of more than €3bn this year, and most of the money still goes towards putting fires out, not preventing them.
Most national fire budgets go towards putting fires out rather than stopping them starting. Yet the economics point the other way. Experts expect fire-prone weather to intensify by roughly a quarter in the coming decades, and Europe’s spending has not caught up.
That €3bn figure comes from Financial Times analysis, covering reforestation and land restoration costs in the five worst-hit eurozone countries. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Shuttered businesses, ruined harvests and the health toll of smoke are all left out of the count, meaning the true cost runs significantly higher.”
Spain at the frontline
Fighting the recent fires in Spain may cost between €1.72bn and €3.28bn, according to Euronews figures derived from area burned and per-hectare suppression costs. Restoration, the dean of Spain’s forestry engineers told Infobae, is usually more expensive still.
The visible, well-funded response—aircraft, crews, water-bombers—is the smallest and cheapest part of the problem. The larger costs sit downstream and are largely absent from planning for Europe’s hotter future.
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Spain has no unified official method for costing its fires. Spending is devolved to 17 regions that each budget differently. The government’s own MITECO Estudio de Inversión Forestal report finds that under 30 per cent of regional and just 20 per cent of central-government fire spending goes to prevention. Fire extinction budgets, meanwhile, have been restored above pre-crisis levels, while prevention funds have not.
The central government’s own return to MITECO put prevention spending at just €144m in 2024. The state has since raised its firefighting budget by more than a third, with seven new water-bombing planes on order. In Greece, more than 80 per cent of the 2022 fire-protection budget went to fighting fires rather than preventing them.
Prevention over suppression
Europe heating faster than any other continent. Its fire budgets have yet to adapt to where the money is needed most.
The response is sexy. You see the lights, you hear the helicopters. Prevention isn’t sexy. Nobody sees it.
— Janez Lenarčič, then-Commissioner for Crisis Management, European Commission
Wildfire researchers call this the “firefighting trap“: a focus on suppression lets fuel build up in unmanaged forests, feeding bigger fires that demand still more suppression. As the EU’s then-crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarčič, put it in 2024: “The response is sexy. You see the lights, you hear the helicopters. Prevention isn’t sexy. Nobody sees it.”
Research from the World Bank and the European Commission estimates that every euro spent on prevention saves between four and seven in damage. Commission officials have cited figures as high as ten. Prevention is by far the higher-return investment, yet it remains the underfunded one.
The EU’s March 2026 strategy expands the crisis response rescEU fleet by 12 firefighting planes and five helicopters and builds a firefighting hub in Cyprus. It is necessary and visible, but squarely on the response side of the ledger.
And Europe’s fires will only grow. Research published this year finds that summer days with extreme fire conditions have more than doubled across Iberia, France, Italy and Greece since 1981.
And these fire weather conditions will keep worsening for three decades regardless of the emissions path, one 2024 study projects with a rise of around 24 per cent by the 2050s even under aggressive decarbonisation. Suppression capacity, the authors of the separate Nature study warn, is already being exceeded.
The Commission books wildfires’ average annual cost at €2.5bn. That figure was already exceeded this year by a single two-month restoration estimate. Europe keeps spending at the wrong end of the problem, even though prevention is by far the cheaper fix.
