Wildfires: rural abandonment is the real fuel

The wildfire chart that exposes rural abandonment

The peak in wildfires in Spain is not a quirk of the weather nor a political conspiracy, but the economic consequence of half a century of transformation of the countryside. Farm mechanisation in the 1960s emptied the villages, and with them disappeared the pastures and crops that kept the land clear. Millions of hectares of farmland turned into unmanaged forest, perfect fuel for any spark.

The shift to a service-based economy since the 1980s accelerated the process. Fewer people in the countryside means less controlled burning, less firewood gathering, less use of biomass for heating. What used to be burned in hearths and ovens now accumulates. The result: when a dry summer arrives, what burns is land that is no longer good for anything.

The figure that breaks the official narrative

Those pointing at the chart forget to ask why there is so much to burn. Every hectare no longer farmed is a hectare that feeds future fires. Spain's planning law, by making it harder to burn stubble and scrubland, has helped fatten up the biomass. Meanwhile, spending on firefighting keeps growing, but forest area keeps expanding too. It is the Spanish paradox: the more we invest in putting out fires, the more wood we pile onto the land. Literally.

Given all this, any attempt to correlate the number of wildfires with climate change falls short unless it factors in economic abandonment. The countryside does not burn on its own: it burns because we have let it starve to death.