France has burned 93,301 hectares this year, the most in the twenty years the European Forest Fire Information System has mapped the country, and 40.6% more than the 66,337 hectares of 2022. Both figures come from the same Copernicus endpoint, re-pulled on Monday afternoon; the 2026 number rises as fires are mapped, and every figure here is stamped to that pull.
The shape of the season matters more than the total. On 8 July France stood at 39,441 hectares, a little ahead of 2019 at the same date and unremarkable against 2022. A week later it was at 43,699. Then the fires dated to 16–22 July added 41,607 hectares in one entry, taking the cumulative to 85,306 and past the 2022 full-year record somewhere inside that week. Nothing since has come close: the following two weeks added 5,282 and 2,432 hectares.
That single week burned more than France did in 18 of the previous 20 full years. Only 2022, the year of the Gironde fires, and 2019 were larger over twelve months than that week was over seven days. EFFIS books a fire’s whole mapped area against the week it was first detected, so this is a statement about fires dated to that week rather than about the day a counter crossed a threshold; in real time the record was passed in the last days of July.
The multiple usually attached to a season like this is where the reporting gets unstable, and this publication contributed to that. On 27 July we told readers that EFFIS put France’s burnt area at 91,265 hectares, "6.2 times its 20-year average". The arithmetic was right — EFFIS serves a 2006–2025 mean of 14,755.85 hectares, and 91,265 divided by that is 6.19. What the sentence did not say is that the average spans a change in how the burning is seen.
EFFIS moved from MODIS imagery at 250-metre resolution to Sentinel-2 at 20 metres from 2018, and the effect on the French series is not subtle. In the thirteen years to 2018 the system mapped an average of 22 French fires of 30 hectares or more a year. Since 2019 it has mapped 225 a year. France’s own national fire database, BDIFF, run by the agriculture ministry, records 39 such fires a year before the break and 56 after — a rise of about half, against a rise of tenfold in what the satellite sees.
That comparison is the test that settles which side moved. If France had simply stopped recording fires, the ratio between the two sources would have shifted for a mundane reason. It did not: outside the fifteen Mediterranean departments, the area BDIFF records burning rose from 2,080 hectares a year to 8,160, and its fire count rose by half. The denominator grew. The ratio of EFFIS to BDIFF still went from 0.57 to 4.03, and the two periods do not overlap at all — every year to 2018 sits below 1.75, every year from 2019 above 2.14.
Two mechanisms sit inside that and the data cannot separate them. A 20-metre sensor detects fires a 250-metre one never resolved, and EFFIS maps all fires affecting natural land, including grass, scrub and agricultural burning that a forest-fire register may never open a record for. The JRC says as much in its own technical documentation. Either way, the pre-2019 half of the average is a different instrument’s view of France, and averaging across it produces a yardstick no single year was ever measured with.
EFFIS is aware of the problem and has a fix that does not fully work. Its statistics portal defaults to counting only fires of 30 hectares or larger, and the JRC’s annual report says that exclusion exists precisely "in order to make consistent comparisons" across the switch. The France series breaks in two inside that filter anyway, which is where the figures above come from.
Set against the like-for-like period — the Sentinel-2 years 2018 to 2025, mean 28,661 hectares — France is running at 3.26 times its average burnt area rather than 6.3. That is the figure this publication should have used on 27 July, and it is still an extraordinary year. The record itself needs no adjustment at all: 2022 and 2026 were mapped by the same satellite under the same rules, and EFFIS’s annual figures for 2006 to 2024 are byte-identical between captures a year apart, so only the live year moves.
The wider European picture is running the same way. The JRC put the EU at 529,192 hectares burnt by 9 August, against 459,956 at the same point last year and a long-term average of 197,347. France’s 341 mapped fires are themselves a series record, ahead of 304 in 2019 and 290 in 2022.