Spain, France and much of the rest of Europe were battered by megafires this summer. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled their homes, and vast stretches of forest, houses and infrastructure were reduced to ash. These fires are more than a natural disaster. They are a stark warning that the way we respond to wildfires in an era of climate change must be reconsidered.
Heat alone was not the cause. Frequent rainfall last winter and spring drove a sharp increase in vegetation, building up fuel in the forests. Record heat, heat domes and prolonged drought then turned that growth into vast quantities of combustible material almost overnight. Strong winds followed, and the fires generated their own updrafts and cumulonimbus clouds, expanding into megafires beyond prediction or control. Recent research found that climate change raised the likelihood of extreme fire weather roughly 20-fold in Spain and about twofold in France.
Europe's experience makes clear that the paradigm for wildfire response must shift from suppression to prevention. No matter how many firefighters and aircraft are deployed, suppression alone has limits in reducing damage under extreme weather conditions. The most effective response is to reduce forest fuel before a fire starts and to systematically manage high-risk areas so that blazes do not grow into megafires.
Recent scientific research bears out the effectiveness of prevention-centered forest management. A study published in the journal Science in 2026 analyzed 285 large wildfires in the western United States along with more than 14,000 sites where forest fuel management had been carried out. Areas that had undergone forest thinning and fuel removal saw the probability of fire spread fall by up to 20% and the incidence of moderate- to high-intensity fires drop by as much as 80%.
The study also found that such work prevented damage across roughly 61,000 hectares, avoiding $2.8 billion in social and economic losses. Every dollar invested in fuel management yielded about $3.75 in benefits and saved $5 to $6 in suppression costs. That shows fuel management is not merely a forestry project but the most effective climate crisis strategy available for protecting lives and property and easing the burden on public finances.
South Korea is no exception. Summer heat waves and torrential rain have become recurrent here as well, producing the same pattern seen in Europe — fuel accumulating over winter and spring, then drying out rapidly in summer — and summer wildfires are on the rise. Europe's megafires this year are a grave signal that when climate change combines with a buildup of forest fuel, large wildfires can break out in Korea regardless of the season.
We are no longer in an era when wildfires can be addressed through better extinguishing techniques alone. What is needed is a comprehensive push on several fronts: expanded forest thinning and fuel management, more sophisticated fire risk forecasting and spread prediction, early detection using drones and satellites, and a systematic national fuel management policy. Fuel management in particular is the most economical investment available, one that reduces fire damage while heading off enormous suppression costs and social losses at the same time.
Now that the climate crisis has become part of daily life, a country's wildfire capacity is no longer judged by its ability to put out fires. This is an era in which national competitiveness rests less on how quickly a fire is extinguished than on how well forests are managed so that fires never grow large. Europe's wildfires show clearly that prevention-centered forest management is the new standard for wildfire response in the age of climate crisis, and the single most important national strategy we must put into practice right now.
