Wildfire season in Europe — three questions that decide whether your household needs to prepare
European wildfire risk used to be a Mediterranean problem. It is now a problem from the Algarve to the Baltics. Whether your household needs a wildfire plan comes down to three honest questions about where you live — and three small actions if you answer yes to any.
The map has changed
In 2017 the dominant European wildfire fatalities were in Portugal and Greece. In 2023, fires destroyed homes in Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. In 2024, Latvia recorded its first evacuation-triggering forest fire. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) maps now show meaningful wildfire risk across a band that runs from Iberia through the Alps to the Baltics — far north of where the historical maps drew it.
This is not a forecast that your specific village will burn. It is a recognition that the household-level threshold for "do I need a wildfire plan?" has dropped across most of Europe.
Three honest questions
You probably need to think about this if you can answer "yes" to any of the following:
- Are you within 500 m of forest, scrubland, or large grassland that hasn't burned in the last 10 years? Untreated vegetation accumulates fuel. The distance is short — wildfire embers travel 1-2 km in moderate wind, more in dry windy conditions. 500 m is the ember-shower zone.
- Do you live on a slope, with vegetation immediately below your house? Fire moves uphill 2-3 times faster than on flat ground. A house at the top of a slope with brush below is in a meaningfully higher-risk position than one at the bottom or on level ground.
- Is your only road out narrow, winding, and shared with other households in similar terrain? The evacuations that fail in Europe are almost always failures of single-road exit — Mati in Greece (2018), Pedrógão Grande in Portugal (2017), parts of southern France in 2022. If you have one road out and it goes through forest, that is the constraint.
If you answered no to all three, your wildfire risk is low and three minutes of awareness is enough. If you answered yes to one or more, you have three concrete actions worth doing — none of them dramatic, all of them cheap.
Three actions if any answer was yes
- Clear 5 metres of "defensible space" around the house. Dead leaves on the roof, dry needles in the gutters, woodpiles touching the wall, dry shrubs against the foundation. None of this is about preparing for fire heroics. It is about removing the easy fuel that lets an ember start a house fire. Two hours of work, once a year, at the start of summer.
- Pre-pack a 15-minute evacuation bag and put it in the car. Not on a shelf, not in a closet — in the car. The wildfire evacuations that fail are the ones where families spent 20 extra minutes packing while the fire moved. The bag contains: documents (passports, insurance, deed), one week of essential medications, a list of phone numbers on paper, water, a battery pack, one change of clothes per person, and the kit you already keep for blackout. That's it.
- Identify your two evacuation routes — by car and by foot. The car route is your primary. The foot route exists for the day the car route is blocked. Walk it once. A 4-km foot evacuation through familiar terrain is survivable. A 4-km foot evacuation through panic, smoke and burning embers without knowing the way is not.
What this is not
This is not advice to leave your home preemptively. The default protection for a wildfire-adjacent household in good defensible-space condition is to shelter inside — closed windows, wet towels at door frames, full bathtub for emergency water, away from windows. Evacuation is the response when the fire authorities issue an order or when the front of the fire is visible and close. Spontaneous self-evacuation into traffic on a single road is the most dangerous thing a household can do during an active wildfire.
The EFFIS map at effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/apps/effis_current_situation/ shows current fire-danger forecasts by 1 km grid. Check it on the first hot week of summer. Bookmark it.
One thing this week: answer the three questions honestly. If all three are no — you're done. If any is yes — clear gutters and dead leaves around the house this Saturday. Two hours. It is the highest-leverage two hours of wildfire preparation a household can do.
— Systems Fail Lab