By 16 September the European Forest Fire Information System had recorded 668,035 hectares burned across the Union this year. That figure sits well below the equivalent point in 2025, which remains the worst season on record, and well above the twenty-year average of 346,567 hectares for the period 2006 to 2025. Nine member states activated the Union Civil Protection Mechanism for wildfires over the summer. France set a national record for burned area.
The comparison with 2025 is the one most likely to be misread. A season that burns two-thirds of what the worst year on record burned, and nearly twice the twenty-year mean, is not a recovery. It is the second data point in what the Joint Research Centre has been describing for several years as a shifted baseline, in which the years that once counted as exceptional now sit inside the normal range and the exceptional years exceed anything the current response capacity was designed for.
That design question is where the money has gone. The rescEU reserve, which the Commission funds directly rather than through member state co-financing, is being built out with twelve new firefighting aircraft destined for Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Greece, and five helicopters, one of which was delivered to Romania in January and flew operationally this season. Two more are allocated to Slovakia and two to Czechia. Fifteen ground firefighting teams and one advisory and assessment team were held on standby across the summer.
The logic of a European reserve is straightforward and the arithmetic behind it is not obvious to every national treasury. Peak fire risk arrives at different times in different basins, which means an aircraft stationed in Sweden is idle when the Peloponnese is burning and vice versa. Pooling assets at Union level buys more effective coverage per euro than twenty-seven national fleets sized for their own worst week. The difficulty is that the shifted baseline is compressing those windows. When Iberia, the Balkans and central Europe face elevated risk simultaneously, as happened repeatedly in July and August, the pooling advantage shrinks and the reserve becomes a queue.
The helicopter allocations to Slovakia and Czechia are worth noting for what they say about that geography. Central Europe was not a rescEU priority when the reserve was conceived; the fleet was designed around Mediterranean summers. Placing aircraft north of the Alps is an admission that the fire map has moved, and it has moved into forests and fire services with far less accumulated experience of large-scale wildfire than their southern counterparts. Equipment arrives faster than the expertise to use it well.
Civil protection is only half of the directorate’s work, and the other half is under harder pressure. The Commission set an initial humanitarian budget of 1.9 billion euro for 2026 against an assessed global need affecting 239 million people, at a moment when several major donors are cutting their contributions. The scale of individual disbursements tells the story: on 18 September the Union released 150,000 euro through the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for flooding on Luzon in the Philippines, reaching more than 32,000 people with meals, drinking water and hygiene kits. That is a rounding error against the fleet procurement, and it is what emergency response to a monsoon flood now costs per head when the envelope is fixed.
The two halves are converging in an uncomfortable way. As European seasons worsen, the political case for spending on aircraft based in European countries strengthens, and it strengthens in direct competition with a humanitarian line that has no domestic constituency. Nothing in the 2026 figures forces that choice yet. The next multiannual budget will.
