Europe is burning again. The images from this summer’s wildfires are devastating: forests reduced to blackened landscapes, homes destroyed, communities evacuated and firefighters facing extraordinary conditions.

Our attention is understandably focused on this immediate human and environmental cost.

But there is another consequence of these fires that receives far less attention, and it concerns me greatly: our carbon stocks are burning.

Forests are collections of trees, yes, but they are also vast stores of carbon accumulated over years and decades. When they burn, part of that stored carbon is rapidly returned to the atmosphere. At the same time, the landscape’s ability to absorb carbon in the years ahead may be diminished.

This means wildfires are not only being made worse by a changing climate. Increasingly severe fires could themselves make our climate challenge even harder to solve.

Beyond Wildfires, Europe Is Feeling The Heat

Wildfires are nothing new. They have occurred for as long as vegetation has existed, caused naturally by lightning and other events as well as by human activity. Many ecosystems have evolved with fire and can be remarkably resilient.

But the conditions in which those fires occur are changing. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe has already warmed by approximately 2.5°C relative to pre-industrial temperatures. That makes Europe the fastest-warming continent on Earth, warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

Severe heat and drought are increasingly drying vegetation and soils. This does not mean climate change starts every wildfire. Ignition can have many causes. But what matters is what happens once a fire starts.

Extended heat, low soil moisture and extremely dry vegetation can create conditions in which fires spread more rapidly and become much harder to control.

This summer, once again, we are seeing the consequences across parts of Europe. In France alone, Copernicus estimated wildfire emissions of 0.89 megatonnes of carbon in July, equivalent to 3,3 megatonnes of CO 2 . That’s around 39% above the previous July record set in 2022.

While a final European emissions total has not yet been published, available data suggests that wildfires have likely released on the order of 20 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, equivalent to roughly 75 million tonnes of CO₂. That’s on the scale of the annual emissions of a medium sized European country. As of August 5, wildfires had burned 505,683 hectares (around 1.25 million acres) across the EU, a broadly equivalent land area to the state of Delaware.

Recent fires in Belgium’s Hautes Fagnes, including the country’s largest recorded wildfire, also highlight another concern: peat. Peatlands can store carbon accumulated over thousands of years, yet severe fires can release some of that carbon remarkably quickly.

The global picture is even more striking. More than 150 million hectares, or around 370 million acres, were affected by wildfires between January and April alone. That was 50% above the recent average for the same period between 2012 and 2025, almost double the figure for 2024 and 20% above the previous record set in 2020.

2025 is yet the year with most fires and emissions but we have not yet seen the full year of 2026. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned recently , a strengthening El Niño is “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”, with extreme heat, drought and wildfires intensifying across many parts of the world.

These global figures need to be treated cautiously, as they include many different types of vegetation and naturally occurring or managed savannah fires. But they underline the extraordinary scale at which vegetation is burning.

What Happens When A Forest Burns

Through photosynthesis, vegetation removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores carbon in biomass and soils. Trees are particularly important because they can accumulate carbon for decades.

A severe wildfire can reverse part of that process remarkably quickly. Carbon accumulated over many years can be released within hours or days. Research published in Science found that global carbon emissions from forest fires increased by 60% between 2001 and 2023.

Then comes the much slower process of rebuilding that carbon stock as vegetation returns. In effect, a severe fire can create a carbon debt in hours that may take decades for a recovering forest to repay.

Climate accounting separates fossil and biogenic carbon, and for good reason. Burning coal, oil and natural gas introduces carbon into the active carbon cycle that has been locked underground for millions of years.

Carbon released by burning vegetation can, in principle, be taken up again as the forest regrows.

But the atmosphere does not distinguish between a molecule of CO₂ released by an oil refinery and one released by a burning tree.

The important question is what happens next. Will that carbon be removed again? And how long will it take?

If fires become more frequent, drought becomes more severe or the ecosystem changes sufficiently that the forest cannot fully regenerate, that recovery becomes much less certain.

A serious wildfire can therefore hit us twice: first by releasing carbon already stored in vegetation and soils, and second by reducing the damaged landscape’s ability to absorb carbon in the future.

This is the part of the wildfire problem that I find particularly alarming.

We experience a vicious circle: higher temperatures and drought create more favorable conditions for severe fires; fires release carbon and damage terrestrial carbon sinks; and those weakened sinks become less capable of helping us manage the increasing concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

This is not to suggest that every wildfire represents a permanent loss of carbon storage. Forest ecosystems are complicated, and many recover successfully.

But as fires become more severe or return more frequently, we should be asking whether the terrestrial carbon sinks we have historically relied upon will remain as dependable in the future. That question deserves far more attention.

Management Of Wildfires And Climate

There are, of course, practical measures that can reduce wildfire risk.

Better forest management matters. Early detection systems, including drones and satellite monitoring, can identify fires sooner. Thinning vegetation and creating barriers can help prevent fires spreading. Protecting forests and peatlands, restoring degraded landscapes and improving resilience to drought can help preserve important carbon stores.

We can and should do all of these things, but we should also recognize their limits.

We cannot prevent every ignition, and we cannot eliminate drought through forest management. There is a point at which hotter, drier landscapes will overwhelm even excellent firefighting capabilities.

That brings us back to the underlying problem. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while protecting and strengthening the natural carbon sinks that help remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Wildfires should therefore be viewed not only as natural disasters, environmental tragedies or firefighting emergencies. They are increasingly also carbon-management events.

I would like to see estimated CO₂ emissions routinely included in news coverage of major wildfires, alongside hectares burned, homes lost and people evacuated. It would help make this less visible consequence of fire much harder to ignore.

That may be one of the most important lessons from Europe’s burning summer.

We cannot water-bomb our way out of a climate problem. Better fire management can reduce the risks and limit the damage but only by stabilizing the climate can we address the underlying trend.