A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth.
The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee.
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As climate scientists long warned would be the case, Europe’s wildfires are worsening in intensity, scale and duration as the planet heats up. When the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, attributed the current crisis to the effects of the climate emergency, he was stating the obvious. But to his great credit, Mr Sánchez has been among the few leaders to argue that the European Union’s green transition should be accelerated accordingly. Whether on funding adaptation efforts, or driving the macro changes needed to slow the rate of global heating, far too many others appear happy to fiddle while the continent burns.
In June, for example, with spectacularly bad timing, Emmanuel Macron’s government sought savings by announcing steep cuts to a Green Fund designed to help local authorities address climate and environmental challenges. Across Europe more generally, amid persistent low growth and the fallout from Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a false dichotomy is increasingly being drawn between green ambition and competitiveness. This month, under pressure from countries such as Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, the European Commission unveiled proposals to weaken the EU’s emissions trading system, its flagship climate policy. If adopted, heavy industry would receive free polluting permits for longer and at lower cost.
Calls for the dilution of green measures are generally accompanied by the assertion that Europe needs to take a more pragmatic approach, at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and aggressive economic competition. The argument is wrong twice over: the faster the EU moves towards net zero, the better it will consolidate Europe’s position in the global markets of the future. More fundamentally, as the appalling impact of this summer’s wildfires vividly illustrates, the notion that climate measures are a kind of optional add-on, appropriate only when times are good, is wildly at odds with the developing reality.
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As a fourth heatwave hits Europe, temperatures in south-west France are predicted to hit 40C on Wednesday. According to a recent study, if the warming rate of the last decade continues, the 1.5C limit set by the Paris agreement will be redundant by 2030. Yet, far from seeking to catch up with the pace of change, too many governments and leaders are seeking to put their foot on the policy brake. That is not realism; it is a dereliction of duty.
