Wildfire prevention requires ‘nature-based solutions’: Land ‘treating us’ the way we treat the land

Carys Garland is pleased to welcome Alexander Held, Senior Expert of the Resilience Programme for Integrated Fire Management. Held explains how Europe’s escalating wildfire crisis is exposing the limits of a response model built around emergency suppression rather than long-term resilience. He argues that while the European Union has significantly improved its capacity to coordinate firefighting efforts, it continues to intervene only after the fact: once wildfires have already become uncontrollable. His central thesis is that the challenge is no longer primarily one of firefighting but of landscape governance. Climate change may intensify the conditions for extreme fires, yet the scale and destructiveness of these events are also shaped by decades of land abandonment, fuel accumulation, changing agricultural practices, and political incentives that favour highly visible emergency responses over less visible preventive measures.