Formal protection is not sufficient to prevent wildfires

A huge proportion of the land affected by wildfires in Europe belongs to Natura 2000 protected areas

Laura Bejder Jensen, Sebastian Gräff – The European Correspondent

Published On: September 25th, 2026
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© Marcus Kauffman / Unsplash

In wildfire seasons between 2015 and 2025, protected nature around the size of Montenegro burned in Europe, according to The European Correspondent’s analysis of data from the European Data Journalism Network.

That’s 1.3 million hectares, or almost 2% of Europe’s protected areas under Natura 2000, a network of protected nature sites across the EU.

These areas are disproportionately affected by wildfires. Though they only make up 18.6% of European land, around 29% of the area that has burned over the past 11 years was protected under Natura 2000.

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Figures are calculated for fires between May and October and compared to Natura 2000 land area in 2024

Portugal’s on-land Natura 2000 areas were most affected, with 13% having burned at some point between 2015 and 2025. Over 3% of the area covered by Natura 2000 burned in Spain, Greece, and Hungary each.

In August 2023, a 16-day-long megafire in Evros in northern Greece burned around 96,600 hectares of which 65% was part of a Natura 2000 area.

In some cases, this land burns over and over.

Around 23,200 hectares in the Danube Delta in Romania, protected because of its rare wetland habitats and vast biodiversity, have burned multiple times during five wildfire seasons.

Natura 2000 areas are not necessarily wild. They’re designated based on whether they serve as important wildlife habitats to limit human activity that could disturb the species living there.

Some human activities are still allowed. In fact, 40% of the network is farmland, and another 50% is forest, according to the European Environment Agency.

These sites’ disproportionate vulnerability to wildfires could have something to do with that: research from the Complutense University of Madrid on Spanish nature shows that a “higher incidence of wildfires within the Natura 2000 network is largely associated with its higher proportion of forest land.”

Right now, Europe is failing to protect even its most protected areas. If we want to keep our landscapes healthy and intact, it’s time to step it up.

Original source: https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/protected-on-paper-burning-in-practice.

Translator/s:

Tags: European Union, Wildfires

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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