Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires

Charts circulating online this week claimed 2026 is Europe's quietest wildfire year in over a decade, but Carbon Brief says that's misleading. Those figures lump in the whole of Russia, which normally makes up eighty to ninety percent of the region's burned area and is having an unusually calm season this year, masking what's happening further west. According to Carbon Brief, EU-only data tells a different story: France has broken its modern wildfire record by nearly twenty-four thousand seven hundred hectares, and Spain's season is nearly five times its historical average, with fires displacing well over a third of a million people across the two countries. An impending heatwave has raised fears the fires could worsen in the days ahead.

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