Climate change, together with decades of land mismanagement, has made wildfires more frequent, more intense and harder to control – especially in Southern Europe. Citing EFFIS-Copernicus data, Italian news outlet EUNews reported in March 2026 that more than one million hectares burned across Europe in nearly 7,800 fires in 2025 alone.
France has faced another devastating wildfire season this year. In late July, fires swept through the Gironde region, threatening Bordeaux, ravaging the Cap Ferret peninsula and forcing around 220,000 people to evacuate. Although the major blazes were brought under control by early August, they left extensive damage across southwestern France. Even here in the Netherlands, where I live near Veluwe National Park, three separate forest fires had already occurred before summer was fully underway – one requiring international firefighting support.
While some ecosystems recover quickly after fire and even benefit from it, others suffer long-term damage. Earlier and longer fire seasons, more intense heatwaves, accumulated dry fuel, land conversion into flammable monocultures, and the abandonment of traditional land management practices (grazing, forest upkeep, native replanting, rotational weeding) have all made fires larger, more expensive and harder to contain. Wildfire smoke compounds the problem: it carries fine particulates (PM2.5), carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides that travel far from the fire itself and grow more toxic the longer they linger in the atmosphere.
Wildfire smoke can become four times more toxic as it ages and spreads, affecting air quality over entire regions or even continents.
EEA & Climate-ADAPT, 2025
The DPSIR framework (Driving Forces-Pressures-State-Impacts-Responses) which is used to assess and manage environmental problems is a useful way to think about this: it links driving forces (human and natural), pressures, the state of the ecosystem, impacts (social, economic, environmental, political) and risks, then asks what responses – policy, practice, land management – can mitigate the pressures, restore the state of the ecosystem and adapt to worsening impacts.
Forest fires are never the product of a single stressor. Heatwaves, dried-out organic fuel, land-use change and the spread of highly flammable mono-plantations (such as pine and eucalyptus) all compound one another, making wildfire a genuinely complex challenge – one that involves risk, uncertainty, multiple stakeholders, and intervention at very different scales. The full range of ecosystem services a healthy forest provides can’t even be fully quantified, given how socially and ecologically entangled they are. What remains, then, is to implement responses that can be scaled, replicated and adapted – and that intervene early, before a fire starts.
At the EU level, this has meant a large coordinated effort across 14 countries, with 777 firefighters, aircraft, and 24/7 monitoring through the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and Copernicus satellite mapping, backed by the rescEU strategic reserve for large-scale crises. On prevention, the EU’s Forest Strategy 2030, its climate adaptation strategy and its nature restoration regulation all recognise and emphasise that restored, healthier forests are inherently less vulnerable to fire and drought.
At the regional and local scale though, it’s restoration and land management that do the real work of prevention. A 2024 EU Horizon cross-sector dialogue, Firelogue, concluded that nature-based solutions (NbS) for wildfire risk management are still far from mainstreamed in forest policy and practice – which is exactly the gap organisations like EcoAtivo – a nature protection and conservation association located in the heart of the Serra da Estrela region of central Portugal – are trying to close. Rewilding, prioritising fire-resistant native vegetation, buffer zones, adaptive forestry, grazing and dead-biomass management, reforestation, and soil stabilisation are some of the better-known NbS approaches. On the hydrological side – rewetting and restoring wetlands, building small dams, restoring streams – the idea is the same: create landscape-level discontinuities that interrupt how fire propagates, by putting water back into the land instead of letting it run off. EcoAtivo is one organisation putting this directly into practice.
Water retention as a firebreak – and a way to restore the water cycle
Most water retention techniques work on the same basic principle: slow the water down long enough for the ground to absorb it, rather than letting it run off the surface. A few methods, used in combination, achieve this at different scales.
Cut biomass – logs, brushwood, felled bushes – laid along the contour of a slope acts as a simple, low-cost check dam. It breaks the speed of surface runoff and gives sediment and moisture time to settle rather than wash downhill. Swales work on the same logic at a larger scale: shallow ditches dug on contour, with the excavated soil mounded on the downhill side, intercept rainwater before it concentrates into an erosive flow and let it percolate slowly into the subsoil, recharging groundwater rather than draining away (Swale (landform) – Wikipedia; Swales in Permaculture: Part One – Permalogica; Contouring the Landscape for Water Management – Shades of Green). Sowing a green manure mix ahead of the rainy season complements both: fast-establishing cover crops hold topsoil in place with their root mass before the first heavy rains can strip it away, and add organic matter that increases the soil’s own capacity to hold moisture (Overview of Cover Crops and Green Manures – NCAT/ATTRA).
Beaver dams – or human-built “beaver dam analogues” where beavers themselves are absent – are increasingly recognised in wildfire research as one of the most effective ways to protect riparian corridors. Studies from the US Forest Service and researchers at Utah State University and California State University describe the waterlogged strips that beaver activity creates along streams as “emerald refuges”: green corridors that resist burning even when fire sweeps through the surrounding dry landscape, and that continue supporting vegetation and wildlife long after a fire has passed (Firefighting Beavers – US Forest Service; Beavers, Water, and Fire — Working Lands For Wildlife; Beaver Dams Help Wildfire-Ravaged Ecosystems Recover – Scientific American; Could Beavers Be the Secret to Winning the Fight Against Wildfires? – National Geographic). Ponds serve a similar purpose on a smaller footprint — capturing surplus winter rain, buffering the water table through the dry summer, and offering a moist refuge for plants and animals during a fire event.
Community volunteers at work creating beaver dams
Together, these interventions are often described as regenerating the “small water cycle.” Distinct from the large water cycle that carries moisture inland from the ocean, the small water cycle is the local loop of evaporation and evapotranspiration — water absorbed by soil and vegetation, released back into the air by plants, and returned as local rainfall. Healthy, vegetated, water-retentive land keeps this loop turning: it stays cooler, more humid, and more resistant to drought and fire. Degraded, compacted or bare land breaks the cycle instead – rain runs off before it can infiltrate, soils dry out, vegetation retreats, and the land grows progressively hotter, drier and more flammable (Restoring the Small Water Cycles: The Missing Link in Climate Action – TheWaterChannel; Water for the Recovery of the Climate: A New Water Paradigm – Friends of the Trees Society). Every water retention structure is, in effect, a direct intervention in that feedback loop: each litre of water held in the landscape and given time to infiltrate is a litre that keeps the small water cycle turning, rather than draining straight to the sea.
EcoAtivo’s approach in Cova da Beira
The scale of what hit the region in August 2025 is worth spelling out. Portugal recorded one of its worst wildfire seasons in years: more than 172,000 hectares burned nationwide, and in just four days – August 14 to 17 – nearly 96,200 hectares were lost, more than the country burned in the whole of 2023. Fundão, the district where EcoAtivo is based in the Cova da Beira, was named among the areas hit hardest, alongside Castelo Branco, Leiria, Coimbra and Santarém. More than 3,000 firefighters, backed by the army and international reinforcements – including aircraft from Morocco and planes deployed through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism – fought the blazes; two people lost their lives, and the government extended the national state of alert as extreme heat and strong winds kept conditions critical.
As a post-fire intervention following these fires, EcoAtivo has combined rainwater retention structures with the planting of diverse native species – “living strips,” or faixas vivas – in the Cova da Beira region of Portugal, one of the areas hit hardest by uncontrolled wildfires and lax enforcement of land-conversion rules.
Guilherme Weishar, vice-president of EcoAtivo, describes how the right choice of vegetation, combined with water retention, directly shapes fire regime – its seasonality, frequency, severity and extent:
In our region, drought, torrential rain and heat waves are the primary climate challenges. So the first step is to cut down high-rise and dry bushes, then put down rainwater retention structures, and then plant indigenous flora – shrubs and trees. Native broadleaf species like holm oak, chestnut, birch, beech, oak and cork oak burn less readily than resin-rich species like eucalyptus, juniper or maritime pine.
This approach – backed by scientific input from the Scape Fire research project – treats fuel moisture, fuel load and fuel continuity as the core variables to manage, and uses nature-based water retention to address all three at once. The process is outlined in the diagram below; you can also watch a short video here and read more on EcoAtivo’s site.
Source: Ecosystem Restoration Communities, inhouse schema designed for EcoAtivo, Portugal
EcoAtivo currently maintains these water retention structures and nurtures the native plantations that have grown up around them. The next step is building a proper monitoring and evaluation process – and exploring whether certain invasive, climate-resilient species could be used deliberately, and temporarily, as part of the fire-defence strategy.
“Invasive plant species are pioneers at outcompeting natives on every front,” Guilherme explains. “Certain invasive species from climate regions comparable to Portugal could be incorporated into a biodiverse planting plan that includes their removal once the other species are established. Used this way, they could give a stronger kickstart to a severely degraded ecosystem and help bind the soil under harsh conditions. We’d like to put this on the table for discussion, and test it in small, controlled plots to see whether it works.”
This work now continues under Ash2Soil, a 12-month, EU-funded programme born directly out of the 2025 fires in the Cova da Beira. Led by a consortium that includes EcoAtivo, Food4Sustainability, Prout Research Institute Portugal and ARTivos, Ash2Soil brings together science, community action and art across four seasonal gatherings to restore fire-affected land: spring focuses on agroforestry systems to rebuild soil and biodiversity, summer turns biomass cleared for fire prevention into biochar that enriches the soil and holds water, autumn centres on the water retention structures described above, and winter closes the cycle by replanting native trees such as oak, ash and chestnut. Alongside the fieldwork, participants — citizens, scientists and artists working side by side – turn each season’s findings into public art: a travelling mural, a video installation, a documentary. The aim is as much cultural as ecological – turning soil regeneration into shared memory and identity, not just data.
If this got you interested, and you’d like to connect, contribute or share ideas with EcoAtivo, reach out to Guilherme
You can also learn more about the restoration work at ERC EcoAtivo on this site and on their official website
Volunteer blogger Nupur Jain is an EFFAS-certified ESG analyst with more than 13 years of experience in environmental sustainability, climate adaptation, ecosystem management, sustainable finance, and nature-based solutions. A keen researcher and writer, she is skilled at translating complex scientific ideas into clear, engaging stories that are accessible to a broad audience.