France, alongside its Mediterranean neighbors Spain and Italy, is experiencing a sharp rise in severe wildfires, with thousands of hectares already burned and hundreds of outbreaks forcing mass evacuations halfway through the summer. Across the Mediterranean, major fires have also devastated areas in Morocco and Algeria. On July 22nd, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced that France had recorded 12,500 wildfire outbreaks since the start of 2026, with 44,000 hectares already burned this year—a figure that surpasses the total area burned in 2025. This surge follows the devastating summer of 2022, the worst year on record for French wildfires, when 72,000 hectares, or an area seven times the size of Paris, were reduced to ashes.
While changing weather patterns play a critical role, human activity remains the primary trigger for these disasters. Overall, 90 percent of fires are caused by humans, either deliberately or accidentally. In 2026, several people have been arrested for deliberately starting blazes, including a volunteer firefighter accused of starting one of the fires that led to a wildfire in the Forest of Fontainebleau, just south of Paris. However, deliberate acts represent only a small minority, as most wildfires are started accidentally by humans. While actions like casually throwing away a lit cigarette or having a BBQ in the middle of a forest are obviously dumb, heatwaves can increase the risk of fires started in other ways.
During extreme heat, discarded glass can refract the sun and start fires. Even parking a car among long grass can start a fire, as the heat from the exhaust can cause parched grasses to catch fire. Agricultural vehicles sometimes cause fires in this way when driving onto parched land, while sparks from a road-mending crew are believed to have caused another of the Fontainebleau fires. With these escalating threats, many travelers are left asking: is it safe to come to France in wildfire season?
While hot temperatures make it more likely that fires will start, it is weather and climate conditions that turn a small, containable blaze into huge wildfires that devour thousands of hectares and require mass evacuations. These kinds of fires spread very quickly and are extremely difficult to combat, often requiring aerial bombardment of water. Drought conditions cause the fires to spread, as parched vegetation with no moisture catches fire extremely easily. In the height of summer, large parts of the south of France are in this condition. This is not a new phenomenon, which is why there has always been a wildfire "season" in the hottest months of the year and why wildfires are rare in winter.
Wildfires themselves are not new; in October 1970, 11 people perished near France's far southeastern border with Italy, and in 1985, a new inferno in the same area killed five volunteer firefighters. Changes to firefighting techniques mean that these days deaths are more unusual – but the fires themselves are getting more common, bigger and occur over a wider geographical area. Already in 2026, major wildfires have occurred in the Paris region, Brittany, and Normandy—areas where wildfires were previously a rarity.
The general trend of a warming planet means summers are longer and hotter, with heatwaves becoming more common. Changing weather patterns also mean drought is more widespread, leading to more parched vegetation that easily catches fire. In 2022, the wildfires were unusual not only for their size and ferocity but for their geographical spread. Traditionally occurring in the south of France, the summer of 2022 saw at least one fire in 90 of France's 96 mainland départements, including relatively cool northern areas like Brittany. For 22 French départements, the amount of land burned in 2022 increased significantly, representing at least 10 times more than the usual yearly average amount burned, according to Le Monde. This prompted the French environment minister to state: "The whole of the territory [of France] is particularly vulnerable to the risk of fires."
Predicting the future is always difficult, but fire chiefs and politicians are worried and are planning for a future in which wildfires are bigger and more dangerous. "The effects of climate change… mean the fire risk area will get bigger, the high-risk season will get longer, and weather conditions that could trigger very large wildfires will occur increasingly often," Jean-Luc Beccari, head of the fire and emergency services in the Bouches-du-Rhone region near Var, told AFP.
Another critical risk is the resilience of the forests themselves. "Because of climate change we're already seeing trees die off," explained Marion Toutchkov, an expert in wildfire defence at the Office national des fôrets. "We're going to find ourselves with forests containing lots of dead trees. And dead trees mean dry wood and more combustible vegetation." Other climate effects also have an impact; for example, a wildfire in the Alps in 2026 spread rapidly through an area of dead trees that had been uprooted in an avalanche during the winter. Looking forward, a UN report projects that wildfires in Europe will increase by 30 percent by 2050.
