Across Europe, North America, and beyond, landscapes are burning at a scale few imagined possible a decade ago. France, Spain, Greece and Turkey have endured another devastating fire season. The United Kingdom has declared drought across large parts of England and Wales following its driest July on record, while hundreds of wildfires have scarred landscapes more commonly associated with temperate forests than fire-prone ecosystems.
Climate change is undoubtedly amplifying these extremes. But does climate variability alone explain what we are witnessing?
The events unfolding across Europe illustrate that wildfire rarely occurs in isolation. The same hydrological drought that dries forests also reduces river flows, constrains hydropower, threatens cooling water for energy generation, limits navigation, affects agricultural production and places increasing pressure on drinking water supplies. These are not separate crises. They are different manifestations of the same weakening water cycle.
This perspective remains largely absent from public debate. We continue to treat fire primarily as a forestry, emergency response or climate adaptation challenge, when it might also be a symptom of declining watershed resilience. Long before the first spark, the hydrological foundations of the landscape have often already begun to fail.
Healthy watersheds are our first line of defence against wildfire. Forests, wetlands, peatlands and healthy soils function as natural water infrastructure. They capture rainfall, recharge groundwater, maintain soil moisture and regulate local temperatures. Together they sustain vegetation through dry periods and reduce the conditions that allow fires to spread rapidly across landscapes. As noted in The Spectator, rewilding remains one of our best defence against wildfires.
When these systems become degraded, the consequences extend well beyond biodiversity loss. Rivers carry less water during prolonged dry periods. Wetlands shrink. Groundwater recharge declines. Vegetation becomes increasingly water stressed. Landscapes lose their capacity to retain moisture and become progressively more susceptible to extreme fire hazards.
The objective should not simply be more fire-resistant landscapes. It should be hydrologically resilient landscapes: landscapes that retain water for longer, recharge groundwater more effectively, sustain healthy wetlands and rivers, and maintain sufficient ecological moisture to reduce the likelihood and intensity of catastrophic fires.
Credit: Emma Renly on Unsplash
Burnt catchments frequently experience severe erosion, landslides and sediment transport. Ash, nutrients and pollutants are washed into rivers and reservoirs, degrading drinking water supplies and increasing treatment costs. Flood risks often increase as damaged soils lose their ability to absorb rainfall. Aquatic ecosystems may require years, or even decades, to recover.
Water utilities increasingly recognise this reality. Across North America, utilities are investing beyond treatment plants and pipelines by protecting source waters, restoring upstream catchments and preparing for wildfire impacts before they reach reservoirs and distribution systems. Philanthropic organisations are also calling for greater investment in watershed restoration because prevention is proving more effective, and often less expensive, than disaster recovery.
This shift should influence public policy or at least allow good policy to be purposefully implemented.
Too often, wildfire resilience is considered separately from water governance, river basin planning and ecosystem restoration. Yet many of the interventions needed to reduce wildfire risk also strengthen water security. Restoring wetlands increases landscape water retention. Reconnecting floodplains improves groundwater recharge. Conserving mountain forests protects downstream water supplies. Investing in Nature-based Solutions restores the ecological processes that regulate both water and fire.
Credit: Eduard Galitsky
River basins provide the natural governance scale for managing these interconnected risks. Decisions about forests, agriculture, groundwater abstraction, reservoirs, biodiversity conservation, energy production and urban water supply are often made through separate institutions with different objectives and funding streams. Wildfire is increasingly exposing the limitations of this fragmented governance. Building resilience requires institutions capable of managing the water cycle as an integrated system rather than responding independently to its consequences.
This also reinforces a broader lesson. Water security cannot be achieved by managing rivers alone. It depends on maintaining healthy landscapes that generate, store and regulate water across entire catchments. Wildfires are revealing the close interdependence of biodiversity, water and climate, and the need for governance systems capable of managing these connections across varied land-use decisions, rather than treating them as separate challenges. It means seeing water as a foundational element of how landscapes work, and not just an environmental issue, or a water source for agriculture.
Wildfires are becoming one of the clearest indicators of whether the world’s watersheds remain healthy enough to regulate the water cycle on which societies depend. As temperatures continue to rise, the defining question may no longer be how effectively we fight fires, but how effectively can we restore the hydrological resilience of the landscapes to prevent them from becoming catastrophic in the first place.
Author:
Dr. James Dalton, Global Director, Water and Wetlands, IUCN
