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, housing and infrastructure were reduced to ash. The fires amount to more than a natural disaster: they are a stark warning that forces a fundamental rethinking of how wildfires should be handled in an era of climate change.
Heat alone did not cause these fires. Frequent rainfall last winter and spring greatly increased vegetation in the forests, building up forest fuel, and the record heat, heat domes and prolonged drought that followed turned that growth into enormous quantities of fire fuel almost overnight. Strong winds then pushed the fires into megafires that generated their own updrafts and cumulonimbus clouds, making them difficult to predict or control. Recent research has found that climate change made extreme fire weather roughly 20 times more likely in Spain and about twice as likely in France.
Europe's experience makes clear that the paradigm for dealing with wildfires 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, in the end, is to reduce forest fuel before a fire starts and to systematically manage high-risk areas so that fires do not grow into megafires.
The effects of such prevention-focused forest management have also been demonstrated in recent scientific research. According to a study published in the journal Science in 2026, an analysis of 285 large wildfires in the western United States and more than 14,000 sites where forest fuel management had been carried out found that areas treated with thinning and fuel removal saw the probability of fire spread fall by up to 20% and the incidence of moderate- and high-intensity fires drop by as much as 80%.
The study also found that such treatment prevented wildfire damage across about 61,000 hectares, avoiding $2.8 billion in social and economic losses, and that every dollar invested in fuel management yielded roughly $3.75 in benefits and saved $5 to $6 in suppression costs. That shows forest fuel management is more than a forestry project — it is an effective climate response strategy that protects lives and property while curbing government spending.
South Korea is no exception. Summer heat waves and torrential rain have recurred here in recent years, producing a pattern similar to Europe's, in which fuel builds up over winter and spring and then dries out rapidly in summer, and summer wildfires are also on the rise. Europe's megafires this year are a sober reminder that when climate change combines with a buildup of forest fuel, large wildfires can break out in Korea as well, regardless of the season.
This is no longer an era in which wildfires can be addressed through skill at putting them out. The country must pursue a comprehensive approach: expanding forest thinning and fuel management, upgrading fire risk forecasting and spread prediction, deploying drone- and satellite-based early detection, and building a systematic national fuel management policy. Forest fuel management in particular is an economical investment that reduces wildfire damage while also cutting enormous suppression costs and social losses.
Now that the climate crisis has become part of daily life, a country's wildfire response capacity is no longer judged by its firefighting ability alone. What determines that capacity today is not how quickly a fire is extinguished but how well forests are managed so that fires do not grow. Europe's fires show clearly that prevention-focused forest management is the new standard for wildfire response in the age of climate crisis, and a critical national strategy that must be put into practice now.
