Landes de Gascogne: the hidden side of the fires
- Dominique Vernis
- Jul 27
- 9 min read
Wildfires advance near the Proge region on Thursday, July 23, 2026. Photo by Caroline Blumberg/AP
The testimonies of the evacuees are undeniably moving—some of whom have lost everything. The images of Croatian Canadair water bombers and an Airbus A400 are spectacular. The accounts of firefighters battling exhaustion as much against the flames as against the fire are heartbreaking. This "background noise" obscures the essential point: the structural causes of a blaze that is anything but random—a factory forest planted as a monoculture for the timber industry, urbanization that has encroached upon its edges, and adaptation policies that are constantly being postponed. In the Gironde and Landes regions, what is burning today is not just a "forest" but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer sustainable. And who, by the way, is going to foot the bill?
The humanities are not the same.
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Wildfires in the Landes de Gascogne: since July 22, 2026, more than 40,000 hectares have gone up in smoke between Saumos, Biscarrosse, Lège-Cap-Ferret, and Parentis-en-Born, and approximately 220,000 people have been evacuated—a figure that already surpasses the traumatic events of summer 2022 and has not been seen in the region since 1949. On television, there is talk of a historic drought, violent winds, and possible arson. Croatian Canadair water bombers, Portuguese Air Tractors, Czech and Slovakian helicopters brought in to lend a hand, and 1,500 soldiers deployed as reinforcements are shown.
A photo taken from the French Civil Security rescue coordination helicopter shows the Airbus A400M performing
Its very first drop over the forest fire near Lacanau, France, on Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo by Abdul Saboor
What is shown much less is that what is burning is not a forest in the way we spontaneously understand the term. It is a production tool, planted by human hands, shaped for a century and a half according to a single logic—the profitability of maritime pine—and whose very structure explains a good part of its vulnerability. Asking the question "why is it burning so much?" therefore forces us to ask a more disturbing question: who decided to plant this particular forest, who owns it, who profits from it, and who, conversely, is paying the price today?
Landes de Gascogne fires: a manufactured forest, not a donated one
The Landes de Gascogne massif is anything but a natural relic. It is the largest planted forest in Western Europe, nearly one million hectares, composed of more than 80% maritime pine in stands of the same age, managed as "regular monospecific high forests".
Its history begins in the 18th century with the forestry engineer Nicolas Brémontier, tasked with stabilizing the coastal dunes to protect the hinterland, and then truly takes shape with the 1857 law "relating to the drainage and cultivation of the Landes de Gascogne," championed by the civil engineer Jules Chambrelent during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The objective was neither ecological nor aesthetic: it was to drain a vast, unhealthy marshland, a breeding ground for malaria, and transform it into an economic asset through the systematic planting of maritime pine, the only species capable of thriving in these poor, sandy soils. (1)
This historical note is not insignificant: it reminds us that the choice of "all pine" was never an ecological accident, but a political and economic decision, made at a time when the concept of climate resilience simply did not exist. The problem, a century and a half later, is that this model has never been fundamentally challenged—on the contrary, it has been intensified.
Who owns the burning forest?
In France, 75% of the forest area belongs to private owners, a myriad of small and large foresters, often grouped into cooperatives (Alliance Forêts Bois being one of the largest in the greater Southwest), the remainder falling under the forestry regime managed by the National Forestry Office (ONF) for the State and local authorities. In the Landes de Gascogne region, forestry is a regional economic pillar structured around a complete timber industry: nurseries, foresters, sawmills, paper mills, and the panel industry.
Le Monde has gathered a figure that speaks volumes about the economic rationale at play: a hectare of maritime pine, several decades old, is worth approximately €10,000, taking into account the land, the investments in planting and maintenance, and the timber it will eventually produce. This valuation implicitly explains why the industry has long resisted any diversification strategy that would reduce the density—and therefore the productivity and fire risk—of the plantations: each hectare planted with a mixture of species is, in the short term, a hectare that yields less profit.
This is where the question of ownership becomes crucial for understanding the system's inertia: unlike a state-owned forest where the government can, in theory, impose a proactive diversification policy, a private forest fragmented among thousands of owners—the largest of whom manage their plots as long-term investments rather than as ecosystems—is ill-suited to a rapid reorientation of forestry practices. The National Center for Forest Ownership (CNPF) itself acknowledges this in a post-2022 technical report: diversification is hampered by "the economic constraints of the sector."
On Saturday, July 25, 2026, a firefighter stands on a truck on a road near Lacanau. Photo Emma Da Silva / AP.
2022, the lesson we didn't learn
The summer of 2022 had already revealed everything. The fires in La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras destroyed nearly 30,000 hectares in the Landes forest and led to the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. In the aftermath, arborist Thomas Brail, founder of the National Tree Monitoring Group, publicly criticized the planting model: "The Landes forest is essentially composed of maritime pines planted by humans, which are extremely flammable resinous trees." The National Forestry Office then pointed out that nearly half of France's forests consist of single-species stands, representing 7.5 million hectares.
In response to this disaster, Emmanuel Macron announced in October 2022 a plan to "plant one billion trees" over ten years, mobilizing 8 to 10 billion euros as part of the France Relance recovery plan. Eighteen months later, the official figures showed 50 million trees planted—one-twentieth of the target—and the Canopée association denounced a drift: approximately 10,000 hectares of "healthy and thriving forests" had reportedly been clear-cut for replanting, including 6,500 hectares of clear-cuts in Natura 2000 areas, according to its campaign manager, Bruno Doucet. By 2026, this promise had virtually disappeared from the government's agenda.
In other words: the public authorities clearly identified the problem as early as 2022, promised to respond with billions of dollars, and the concrete result, four years later, is that the Landes forest is burning even more than in 2022 — with, according to the director of the Gironde SDIS Marc Vermeulen, a state of drought "much more significant than in 2022, or even than in 1976" , and rates of spread reaching 800 to 1,000 hectares burned per hour in peri-urban areas.
Is the pine tree guilty, or is it being used as a convenient scapegoat?
However, the scientific debate is more nuanced than the dominant media narrative of the "pine tree exploding like a match." On the one hand, a study published in 2025 in Nature Communications shows that, in nine out of ten temperate countries studied, forest plantations have a 57% to 155% higher probability of burning than managed natural forests. Researchers from INRAE themselves, Christophe Plomion and Annabel Porté, explain that the horizontal and vertical continuity of the canopy—the contiguous tree crowns, the absence of discontinuities—allows fire to "jump from one plot to another" and renders conventional firebreaks ineffective, while the pine needle litter decomposes more slowly than dead leaves and accumulates as fuel.
On the other hand, an interview published by Sud Ouest on July 25th presents a serious contradiction that would be dishonest to ignore: an industry professional asserts that "the problem isn't the maritime pine itself, but the fact that the forest is extremely dry" —mature pine being, on the contrary, one of the few species capable of withstanding this type of drought on poor, sandy soil, and stands planted in 2022 have generally fared better than young, dense plantations. According to this source, replacing the pine with another species would make no difference in the face of drought; the real solution would be to reduce planting density—and therefore the overall water consumption of the forest—which ultimately means accepting a decrease in productivity and abandoning a "maximum optimization" approach inherited from a bygone "golden age."
But whether the root cause is monoculture itself or the dense planting that accompanies it, the proposed solution in both cases implies the same thing—reducing the immediate profitability of logging in the name of long-term resilience. This is precisely the type of trade-off that short-term market forces structurally struggle to make, whether it involves an isolated private landowner or an industrial sector organized around production volume.
The work of Inrae on the future of the massif recommends edges and groves of deciduous trees, the preservation of wetlands and riparian forests (2) , the diversification of stand ages, and even the development of silvopastoralism — not to make the forest incombustible, which is impossible, but to slow the spread and give firefighters something to work with.
A house burned down near Lacanau, in the Lège-Cap-Ferret region, Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo Emma Da Silva / AP
Who pays the price for the risk?
This is the dimension least addressed in the press in recent days: who financially bears the consequences of a forestry model whose economic benefits remain largely private?
The Central Reinsurance Fund (CCR) had estimated the cost of the Gironde fires alone in the summer of 2022 at approximately €550 million under the "natural disasters" scheme. More broadly, the average annual cost of climate-related claims in France rose from €2.7 billion between 2000 and 2008 to €6 billion between 2020 and 2023, a "change of scale" according to Florence Lustman, president of France Assureurs.
Of the 40,000 hectares already burned this week, a significant portion of the cost—destroyed homes (more than 240 according to the latest figures), infrastructure, and the mobilization of over 2,500 firefighters and 2,700 gendarmes, police officers, and soldiers—will be covered through national solidarity and the insurance premiums of all French citizens. However, the very structure of the forest, which exacerbated the disaster, stems from management choices made by an industry that continues to profit from this production!
A law that's been languishing in the Assembly
And yet, since July 7, 2026—two weeks before the flames reignited in Saumos—there has been a cross-party bill introduced by Marie Pochon, a Green Party member of parliament from the Drôme region, and co-signed by 57 members of parliament from eight parliamentary groups ranging from La France Insoumise to Horizons, with the exception of the National Rally, the resident arsonist who only comes after the fact to cry wolf (3) . The text notably proposes:
the creation of a national fund for adapting forest areas to fire risk;
a framework for clear-cuts;
strengthened support for more resilient and diversified forestry;
the strengthening of the human resources of the National Forestry Office, with the recruitment of 1,300 additional people for the monitoring of wooded areas;
the ban on stump removal after fire, a practice deemed harmful to the natural regeneration of soils.
The text is based on an alarming observation: tree mortality has reportedly increased by 125% in mainland France over the past ten years. Its signatories are calling for its swift inclusion on the National Assembly's agenda. As of July 26, while the Landes forest is burning for the second time in four years on this scale, the text has still not been examined.
A tree trunk burns in Lanton, in the Lège-Cap-Ferret region, on Saturday, July 25, 2026. Photo by Emma Da Silva / AP
A geopolitics of fire: European solidarity put to the test
To combat the fires in Gironde and Landes, France called upon resources from across Europe: two Croatian Canadair water bombers, two Portuguese Air Tractors, and two Czech and Slovakian Black Hawk helicopters, within the framework of European civil protection solidarity mechanisms. The French government also mobilized 1,500 military personnel, a Reaper surveillance drone, and an A330 MRTT tanker aircraft—a level of mobilization whose scale is more reminiscent of an overseas operation than a simple forest firefighting effort.
This European pooling of resources raises a fundamental question: as climate change multiplies megafires—52 French departments were already classified as high risk by April 2026, compared to a handful historically concentrated around the Mediterranean—will this system of solidarity through the loan of resources (the European Civil Protection Mechanism, rescEU) be able to continue functioning when several countries are simultaneously affected at the same time during the summer? Or when a certain political party (the National Rally), once in power, rushes, in the name of "national sovereignty," to implement a kind of more or less disguised Frexit?
Dominique Vernis, Isabelle Favre
NOTES
(1) According to Rémy Petit, a researcher at INRAE, "this pine forest was planted in the 18th and 19th centuries in a vast wetland area which had to be drained for this purpose, initially with spades, and now with excavators. This immense area of wet heathland can be seen on this beautiful map created a year after the French Revolution. It is high time to start draining the land, something the Landes de Gascogne Regional Natural Park is trying to encourage, without much support so far."
(2) A Bon Pote investigation published on July 13, 2026, a few days after the bill was tabled, sheds light on the RN's fundamental position on this type of measure. The RN group has in the past:
Voted against a forest adaptation plan aligned with the national low-carbon strategy, a measure nevertheless requested by the High Council for the Climate,
Amendments concerning firebreaks of deciduous trees between plots of coniferous trees and the preservation of forest roads necessary for firefighting were rejected.
A law was passed to exempt forestry work from penalties related to the destruction of natural habitats, in the name of "fire prevention".
Rejected from increases in funding for fire and rescue services (SDIS) via the tourist tax or insurance,
Adopted a "utilitarian" approach to the forest, favouring tax incentives and technical solutions (atmospheric water generators, aerial means) rather than coercive measures — precisely the type of mechanisms (regulation of clear-cuts, prohibition of stump removal) that the Pochon-Davi proposal supports.
On July 23, 2026, a National Rally MP, Emmanuel Taché, tabled his own bill, strictly oriented towards criminal response — automatic and heavier sentences for arson — rather than on the structural adaptation of forests to climate change.
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