Wildfire policy begins before the fire
One thing in the European Commission’s March 2026 wildfire strategy is easy to miss if fire is thought of mainly as an emergency. A great deal of wildfire policy happens when there is no fire.
The Commission’s Communication on Integrated Wildfire Risk Management, adopted on 25 March, treats prevention, preparedness, response and recovery as parts of the same system. Its guidance for agriculture and forests gives farmers and foresters a role throughout that cycle. Grazing, agroforestry, thinning, firebreaks and other forms of land management can affect fuel accumulation and the structure of the landscape long before an ignition occurs.
Ireland is not Mediterranean Europe, and it would be misleading to import the southern European fire story wholesale. The risk profile is different. Still, Irish guidance already treats wildfire as more than a firefighting problem. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s fire-management page identifies a spring fire-risk season and currently lists three Fire Danger Notices for 2026. The Office of Emergency Planning identifies peatlands, turf-cutting bogs, uplands and immature forest lands among the areas particularly prone to wildfire, and notes that active farming, appropriate grazing and other fuel-reduction measures can reduce risk.
That raises a more interesting question than whether Ireland is becoming Spain or Greece. How much of Irish wildfire policy belongs inside ordinary land management?
Some of the answer is already visible. Teagasc’s guidance for forest owners stresses fire plans, maintained firebreaks, access routes, water sources and cooperation with neighbouring landowners. None of this looks dramatic beside aircraft, fire engines or an evacuation. That is precisely the point. The interventions matter because they happen before an emergency.
There is a familiar policy problem here. The benefits and risks of landscape management do not stop at a property boundary. A well-managed parcel may reduce fuel in a wider area. A blocked access route or unmanaged strip can create problems for neighbours. Prevention therefore has some of the same coordination difficulties that appear in water quality, biodiversity and invasive-species policy: the relevant ecological unit is often larger than the individual holding through which policy is administered.
The European approach is useful because it widens the unit of analysis without pretending that every landscape should be managed in the same way. Farms and forests matter, but so do mosaics of land uses and the relationships between neighbouring holdings. Peatlands and habitats have their own ecological objectives, and poorly designed fuel reduction can damage the things a policy is meant to protect. Prescribed burning, where used, also requires expertise, legal compliance and careful timing.
There is another reason for caution. A plausible mechanism is not the same thing as demonstrated effectiveness everywhere. Grazing can reduce some fuels, but the effect depends on stocking, vegetation, season, terrain and the ecological system being managed. The useful policy questions are therefore more specific: where does an intervention work, at what intensity, at what cost, and with what consequences for biodiversity, carbon and farming?
By the time a hillside is burning, many of those choices have already been made. That is why the quiet parts of wildfire policy may turn out to be the more interesting ones.
Elvis Kwame Ofori
Researcher and writer behind EKO Perspectives.
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