The unspoken truth about wildfires

Bordeaux and Madrid are threatened by flames. In Sicily, arsonists tied 
burning rags to the tails of cats to spread fires. Here in Britain the 
Cairngorms and Peak District national parks are ablaze. It’s the climate 
Armageddon, say the greens. If only we had built more wind farms and 
eaten fewer cows this would not be happening.

Hot, dry spells undoubtedly make fires more likely, but awkwardly for 
those blaming climate change, wildfires are getting less frequent 
worldwide, not more, as the globe warms. The acreage burned has 
decreased steadily since 2000, according to Nasa’s satellites, and is 
thought to have almost halved in a century. The great fires of 1871 in 
Wisconsin and Michigan burned more than a million hectares long before 
anybody drove a car, before even Joseph Swan’s first light bulb, when 
the world was cooler.

It is not just the trend that is surprising. Hard to believe, but this 
year is an unusually quiet year for wildfire: so quiet it is breaking 
records for lack of fires by this date, even in Europe. If you don’t 
believe me, check the figures produced by the Global Wildfire 
Information System: as of last week, the world had seen 106 million 
hectares burn this year, the lowest at this date since these records 
began in 2012. In Europe, just 3.6 million hectares have burned – less 
than half the average for this date. That’s cold comfort to people 
driven from their homes in France, but it is nonetheless a fact.

The real issue is that climate change is a handy excuse for politicians 
who have failed to take precautionary measures to prevent wildfires. 
They can just shrug: it’s global warming, innit? It has been known for 
many decades that in fire-prone habitats, the longer you go without a 
fire, the worse the fires will be. So preventing the build-up of tinder 
by controlled burns is the most important factor.

The California filmmaker Gabriel Mann’s hard-hitting 2023 documentary 
Hotshot showed in detail how fire suppression has made today’s fires 
harder to control. He has no patience with those who use climate change 
as an alibi. ‘They tell you the sky is falling and it’s all the fault of 
our modern, shitty climate,’ he says. ‘But when was the climate not shitty?’

Here in Britain the government has consistently and relentlessly 
demanded less ‘cool’ burning – low-intensity, controlled fires – in 
winter on heather moorland, Britain’s most fire-prone habitat. Such 
fires have been used by farmers and gamekeepers for generations to 
create a mosaic of short and long heather. This encourages fresh young 
heather shoots for sheep and grouse to feed on and makes open areas for 
rare birds such as golden plover and curlew to nest in. If done in 
winter it can burn off the rank heather plants while leaving the moss 
underneath barely touched, as demonstrated by a famous video in which a 
gamekeeper places a Mars bar in the moss, lights a fierce fire over it, 
then picks up the unscorched, unmelted chocolate bar, unwraps it and 
eats it.

Natural England argues that regular cool burning harms the habitat; 
researchers at York University and elsewhere argue the opposite: that it 
encourages the growth of sphagnum moss and other species by letting 
light in. But both sides agree that regular cool burns can dramatically 
reduce the risk of much more damaging wildfires, which burn down through 
the moss layer and into the peat. Cutting heather instead is less 
effective but better than nothing. Yet Natural England has banned 
heather burning on deep peat altogether and is pushing hard to limit it 
further everywhere – or at least tie it up in complicated licensing 
rules. As a result, the fuel load on heather moorland has been 
increasing; in places the heather is now waist-deep. The National Fire 
Chiefs Council warned last year that such restrictions on heather 
management would increase ‘the danger to firefighters and the public’.

Unlike private owners, bodies such as the Royal Society for the 
Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the National Trust are refusing to burn 
and reluctant to graze heather moorland, as they join the cult of 
‘rewilding’. With the support of government, they plan to mitigate the 
fire risk by ‘rewetting’ moors with leaky dams to hold back rainwater. 
But this approach is useless in a drought.

Case in point: the Tintwistle fire in the Peak District spread from a 
wild camp in woodland on to a heather moor owned by United Utilities and 
managed by the RSPB. This moor had been extensively ‘rewetted’ yet it 
went up like a torch and the fire spread, drowned Manchester in smoke, 
burned deep into the peat and was only contained – for now – when local 
gamekeepers and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue used two diggers and 
a bulldozer to create a firebreak on its northwest flank on the 
neighbouring Stalybridge estate. But so quick is Natural England to 
prosecute landowners and gamekeepers for even inadvertently breaking 
rules about managing habitat that they were anxious they might be 
punished for doing this.

Richard Bailey, coordinator of the Peak District Moorland Group, 
estimates that the past month’s firefighting by gamekeepers would have 
cost the taxpayer millions of pounds if done by the fire service. Many 
long, hot, hard days and nights have left gamekeepers and their families 
under severe mental strain, alleviated a little by generous food drops 
from Micklehurst cricket club. You can imagine how much it sticks in the 
craw for these gamekeepers that they have been working to save land 
managed by an organisation that makes the risk worse.

The nearby Dovestone fire was also started on RSPB-managed land after a 
man drowned in the local reservoir and his friends commemorated him with 
fireworks. The Cairngorms fire too began on land owned by the RSPB at 
Abernethy. The irony is not lost on locals that the very same people who 
tell us that climate change is an existential crisis are also the ones 
urging us to stop using the one tool we know helps to mitigate the 
problem. If your view is that climate change is a massive threat, why 
are you pursuing policies that increase fuel load?

The North York Moors fire last year affected 2,500 hectares of moorland, 
smouldering for more than a month in the peat and releasing vast 
quantities of carbon dioxide. Yet no Defra minister bothered to visit. 
The cost of fighting these fires does not fall on their department, so 
why do they care, says Jamie Blackett, founder of Ground Cry, a new 
organisation campaigning on behalf of ground-nesting birds like curlews.

The authorities know their policies increase the fire risks. Here is 
what the Cairngorm National Park says in its Integrated Wildfire 
Management Plan about plans to increase shrubs and other vegetation by 
reducing deer and stopping burning: ‘These habitats will take many years 
to develop and during the intervening period fuel loads will increase, 
as will the corresponding need for fire risk mitigation.’ So they knew 
the risk was increasing. But little was done. John Kirk, a board member 
of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, told the Strathspey Herald: 
‘Everyone is furious… the entire Abernethy forest has no firebreaks.’

Andrew Gilruth, chief executive of the Moorland Association, says: 
‘While Scotland has a clear plan to manage the excess vegetation, in 
England the authorities are obsessed with rewilding and restricting all 
commonsense measures for reducing fuel loads.’

In May, before the drought, Gilruth wrote to MPs who represent moorland 
constituencies to point out that the number of firefighters is down by a 
quarter over the past seven years and that the fire service relies 
heavily on gamekeepers’ vehicles, water bowsers and other equipment. 
Banning the burning of heather means fewer keepers can justify having 
such equipment. He described Defra’s refusal to change policy on heather 
burning as reckless.

Sadly he was proved right. So was I. After I warned in these very pages 
last year that government policy was worsening the fire risk on 
moorland, it gives me no pleasure to say: ‘I told you so.’


Matt Ridley