The Truth Behind Britain’s Wildfires

By Paul Homewood

 

 There’s a lot to unpack here.

This was the headline in the Guardian last week:

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/14/2025-on-track-to-beat-uk-record-for-wildfires-warn-firefighters

As usual with the Guardian, they are misinforming you.

Below is the actual data from EFFIS:

 

https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/apps/effis.statistics/seasonaltrend

As you can see, about three quarters of the wildfire area to date occurred in February and March, which as we know were very dry months this year. Clearly however this cannot be blamed on climate change because the Met Office keep telling us that winters are supposed to be getting wetter as a result!

But more to the point, that big spike in the first week of April was accounted for by a series of gigantic fires in the Mountains of Mourne, believed to have been started deliberately:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/06/21/mountains-of-mourne-wildfires/

 

Since that outbreak, nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

But behind all of this data, a real problem seems to be emerging, which has been picked up on X:

https://x.com/artemisfornow/status/1957335292970438931

The Telegraph also have the story:

Labour’s rewilding plans risk sparking a surge in wildfires across Britain, gamekeepers have claimed.

The Government is proposing to ban winter burning – a traditional upland management technique that reduces the amount of fuel for potential fires – from more than half of all peatland in England.

It is claimed the changes will help to “re-wet” Britain’s peat bogs, reduce the risk of wildfires and cut carbon emissions.

Environmentalists want to preserve peat bogs because they soak up vast quantities of carbon. But landowners and gamekeepers have claimed that, far from protecting the environment, the burning restrictions will instead leave Britain’s moors and heaths at the mercy of wildfires that will be “too large to fight”.

Winter burns create firebreaks in upland areas by forming strips where there is less flammable foliage, thereby limiting the speed at which wildfires can spread.

But in 2021, the burns were banned from areas of “deep peat” – where it extends for 40cm or deeper – in conservation areas, totalling 222,000 hectares of land.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is now consulting on plans to extend the burning restrictions to 368,000 hectares of peat by lowering the threshold for “deep peat” to 30cm.

The department argues that wetter peat will reduce the chance of wildfires. But gamekeepers have warned the changes would leave swathes of the countryside vulnerable.

Full story here.

The 2030 Agenda is a global framework established by the United Nations to address pressing challenges like poverty, inequality, climate change, and environmental degradation by 2030. It includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including biodiversity loss.

We can also see a connection here with the recent wildfires in Spain, mostly in Galicia – the Telegraph reported this week;

In Galicia, large stretches of unmanaged vegetation and depopulated villages in forested land have led to the build-up of wildfire fuel, said Adrian Regos, an ecologist at the Biological Mission of Galicia, a research institute.

We also know that exactly the same phenomenon of abandoned plantations in Maui was the reason why the fires got out of hand there a couple of years ago. There the well managed plantations of a few years ago have since been abandoned and overgrown with savanna like invasive grasses, which act as a tinderbox.

As I say, a lot to unpack.

But it is simplistic in the extreme to blame any of these fires on climate change.