A couple of weeks ago I went back home for a short holiday. While looking outside of the train window and as we got away from the city and more into the fields, I started to recognize the classic summer landscape from the south of Aragón: Mediterranean shrub-covered steppes, with not-so-tall plants, specifically adapted to warm and dry summers, with green leaves often covered by some whiteish layer which helps filtering UV light, so it does not burn the plants. As it was middle of July, the wheat fields were supposed to start showing the first notes of yellowish colors typical of the august dry out – in Spanish, agostar, August as a verb, is used to explain that the fields are dry already. However, and as it keeps happening lately, the straw-colored fields were already completely dried. Beyond the obvious signs of heat and drought, the sky told even another story: what seemed to be a grey, stormy sky, was actually a cloud of ashes.

As we have grown used to during the last years, we have to sadly start with a classic sentence: the current summer is the hottest one up to date since we have registered data. In Spain, there is an addendum: we have in our hands the largest burned area up to date since we have statistical records (from 2006). Just to put this into perspective, there have been 366 wildfires already this year, while the total for the whole of 2025 was 350. Even more, the area burnt up until now for 2026 has been 207 257 hectares, less than the total for last year, 393 079 hectares, but we are still in the middle of wildfire season [1]. So, why does the situation seem so out of control?

Sadly, all one can seem to hear after the news about wildfires, in talk shows, newspapers, or daily conversations in the street, are different opinions often tainted by misinformation and fake news. There are many that deny climate change, some saying that this happens only because the forest is “dirty”, blaming the forest abandonment or human action. However, all of these arguments tend to simplify a phenomenon that is no other than the combination of several factors, both ecological and sociological.
Let’s look at it step by step. So many wildfires, and more intense each time, is not something responding to randomness, but to many diverse factors that worsen the situation each year when they interact with each other.

First of all, we cannot deny that the thermometer levels are getting higher and higher. Global average temperatures keep on increasing. Since the existence of official records in Spain (1961), average annual temperatures have increased 1,75ºC; and the warmest years have been, coincidentally, 2026, 2025 and 2022 [2]. Rising temperatures bring along some changes in precipitation patterns as well. We may often hear some pointing out the fact that cumulative annual precipitation has not changed that much lately, and that may be correct when considered on its own. Nevertheless, we should not only care about the amount of water throughout the year, how it is distributed is equally important. Rain used to fall in some sort of evenly distributed way, whereas we actually get precipitation events in which more water falls suddenly, but then we get many more dry days in-between. Now it rains a lot, but just one time. This has several consequences in the ecosystems: soil dries out, and plants lose their moisture. Summing it up, when it’s warmer and plants are drier, it becomes much easier for them to catch fire.

As we are mentioning vegetation, another complaint that has been heard often these last weeks is that the “forests are dirty”. We should make a quick stop here to discuss how misleading this sounds. From an Ecology based point of view, an ecosystem can not be “dirty”. Ecosystems have different stages, and dead wood, dry leaves, and shrubs, have different functions in the forest natural dynamics, from enriching the soil with nutrients to acting as habitats for so many life forms that are crucial for an adequate functioning of the ecosystem. That being said, it is also important to consider, of course, that it may become fuel in case of a fire. So, if it is something natural, why does it seem to have become such a problem?

For starters, Mediterranean ecosystems are made up of species that, as aforementioned, are adapted to warm climates, and also to recurring wildfires. However, ecosystems have evolved along the species that formed them – and human being is one of them. One of the main causes for the increase of fires according to literature is land use changes. Rural abandonment and the loss of traditional farming practices are causing the accumulation of extra biomass in certain areas [3]. if we combine the disappearing of grazing wildlife, the loss of extensive livestock farming, and the increase of intensive and monoculture agriculture, we obtain as a result a landscape that is much more vulnerable to fire propagation. Some accumulation of this biomass in the forest should not be a huge risk in case of wildfire, but too much because of the lack of animals that consume it, either domestic or wild, creates an amount of fuel way over what it should be there, and with a little spark, it can facilitate fire spread [4].

Figure 1: Burnt hill picture for the investigation after the fire. Photo by Generalitat de Catalunya from Wikimedia Commons.