Designing a country that doesn’t burn

Bitter Sweet Symphony

The challenges facing our territories and our economic sectors are complex. That means the factors at play are many, and they interact in ways that are hard to predict and, above all, hard to analyse in isolation.

The stakeholders involved are also many, and their interactions equally complex. And in any challenge or transformation, each person or organisation will have a different (and always partial) view of what the problem is and what needs to be done. That, probably, is how what we call politics is born.

Strategic Design can help with all of this. It helps us understand the system and its complexities, and propose portfolios of solutions. It also helps us understand the different parties, or stakeholders, facilitate their alignment towards a common horizon, and harness the power of collective intelligence to shape and drive solutions that are meaningfully better for everyone.

We develop this blueprint through the Creative Regeneration methodology, built around three movements.

In (1) EXPLORE – sensing the landscape, we research, converse, search and map… to understand the system in depth.

In (2) ACTIVATE – planting seeds of change, we would venture to co-create solutions for the transition (strategies, policies, governance models, businesses, services…) with a range of stakeholders. However, for the purpose of this blueprint, we do this modestly, on the basis of our own analysis. In this case we have not run any co-creation process with multiple stakeholders, although we have asked several people and validated our ideas with them.

In (3) IMPULSE – making seeds flourish, would be the moment to materialise the transition proposals. To make them tangible, and to evaluate their real impact, collectively and properly audited. All of this is beyond the reach of a small studio like ours. So here we limit ourselves to packaging up well the solutions we have found, offering tools and inspiration, so that you can pick up the baton and carry on from here.

Let us light together the spark that will feed a positive transformation.

EXPLORE: who’s who, existing solutions and a map into the future

2025 was the worst year of the 21st century in Spain, with close to 400,000 hectares burned (France 24, July 2026). 2026 also looks set to be one of the worst of the decade, having accumulated some 186,000 hectares burned and 38 large fires in little over seven months, more than five times what burned in the same period of 2025 (La Región, with MITECO data, August 2026). In fact, on 24 July 2026, and for the first time on account of forest fires, the State declared a national emergency in the Community of Madrid and the province of Ávila (Infobae / EFE).

In any case, we need to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are two distinct problems: why a fire starts, and why it turns into a catastrophe. Each has different causes and different solutions.

The total number of fires has, in fact, been falling for decades: there are fewer ignitions. And yet the burned area and the violence of the fire have kept growing (WWF report, via France 24). Fewer sparks, more surface.

A single figure sums it up: large forest fires (those over 500 hectares) are less than 1% of all incidents, yet they account for the vast majority of the burned area, and their average size keeps growing, pulled up by a handful of fires of tens of thousands of hectares (MITECO, Advance report on forest fires 2025; Science Media Centre España). We are not burning more often. We are burning harder.

The structural factors

A structural factor: rural abandonment and fuel build-up

There is a greater accumulation and continuity of plant biomass, stemming from rural abandonment.

The landscape that had kept fire at bay for centuries was a mosaic of crops, pastures, terraces and woodland. And that landscape was produced by a rural human activity that has been disappearing over the course of the 20th century; we will come to why shortly. Extensive livestock grazing consumed the scrub, firewood gathering opened up the understorey, and terraces fragmented the hillsides.

When these human activities disappear, the vegetation homogenises and is left without those discontinuities. Before human beings had such a significant impact on ecosystems, forests were able to self-regulate. They were not a dense, uniform mass, but rather a natural chaos full of diversity. Closer to that mosaic we were talking about. But for centuries now, precisely because of human influence on ecosystems, these forests have needed active management. It would do us good, as human beings, to see ourselves as stewards of the natural ecosystems we inhabit.

The recent evidence is compelling. A study of the 2025 fires in the north-west of the peninsula found that more than half of everything that burned in the EU that month was concentrated in a strip covering barely 2% of the territory, and that it was the scrubland of abandonment, not managed forests, that burned far above what would be expected (Repeto-Deudero et al., 2025, Global Change Biology). And when we cross demographics with fires… rural depopulation emerges as the indicator that best correlates with burned area, according to the Eixo Atlántico study led by Juan Picos, of the University of Vigo (Galiciapress, 14 July 2026). Over the course of the 20th century, Spain’s rural population fell from around 35% to 10% of the total (BBVA, 2025). As rural Spain empties out, the countryside fills up with unmanaged fuel.

Climate as an amplifier

Climate change is a factor, of course. It is not the spark that lights our hills, but it multiplies the devastating impact of every fire. It even changes the nature and behaviour of fire.

Climate change lengthens the risk season, and intensifies and chains together heatwaves. It also creates a time bomb: wet springs that generate abundant vegetation, followed by extreme summers that dry it out and turn it into fuel. More than half of recent large Iberian fires have spread faster than they would have in a pre-industrial climate (Senande-Rivera et al., 2025, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science).

This is how we are witnessing the emergence of the so-called “sixth-generation fires” or “mega-fires”. It is not so much a question of size (though that too), but of behaviour. These fires release so much energy that they can alter atmospheric dynamics themselves, generating their own winds and erratic behaviours that easily overwhelm traditional suppression systems.

With these two factors, we have a climate that creates the conditions for devastating fires, and hills full of fuel ready to start them. So we begin to glimpse something: we must, of course, mitigate climate change as soon as possible, but that transition is slow and, in the meantime, we must manage the landscape so as to limit this loss of control.

Between prevention and suppression

Spain has built one of the best fire-suppression systems in the world, and that very success produces a perverse effect known as the extinction paradox. By systematically putting out every small fire, we prevent the periodic low-intensity burning that historically emptied the fuel load, so that it builds up until the fire arrives that no resource can stop. In the words of fire analyst Marc Castellnou, those low-intensity fires “vaccinate” the landscape against high-intensity ones (Vallfirest; University of Zaragoza / IUCA).

On the other hand, budget allocation reflects the opposite of what science recommends. According to ASEMFO data, around 78% of public spending against fires goes to suppression and only about 12% to prevention (reported by Infobae, 25 July 2026; budget series 2000–2024 at forescat). The thing is that putting out fires costs us far more than preventive action. To give an idea: putting out one hectare costs on the order of €19,000, whereas keeping it grazed by a flock so it does not burn costs about €200 (La Voz del Sur). We pay the expensive bill for not having paid the cheap one. What is more, these preventive activities generate economic activity and quality jobs in rural areas.

There is a point about that 78/12 imbalance we want to put under the magnifying glass. Saying “the money mostly goes to suppression” does not mean suppression is awash with resources. It means the system spends a lot, and late, on putting out, and very little, and out of time, on preventing. What is more, that 78% does not pay for a professional, stable workforce, but for two very different things. On one side, capital-intensive resources, expensive and highly telegenic. On the other, labour that is often seasonal, subcontracted and precarious. Once again, the visible prioritised over the invisible. And here the fragmentation into seventeen models we will discuss later reappears: the same wildland firefighter can earn €1,200 or €1,500, be permanent or seasonal, public staff or subcontracted, depending on the autonomous community they work in. Precisely to set a common floor for those conditions, and to recognise the professional status of those who until then sometimes figured as “labourers”, Law 5/2024, the basic law on wildland firefighters, was passed (BOE). A year on, its application remains very uneven across autonomous communities of different political stripes, as the sector’s unions denounce (UGT). A friend of ours who works as a wildland firefighter in the Valencian Community put it bluntly: we have built the best fire-suppression system in the world on top of a precarious workforce that, on top of everything, is asked not to complain.

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What about ignition?

This is where the debate gets most distorted. Around 95% of fires are of human origin, and only 5% are natural, from lightning, according to the MITECO General Wildfire Statistics, the official source since 1968 (MITECO, EGIF). But this does not mean they are the product of environmental sabotage: many are negligence and traditional uses of fire, badly carried out or out of control. In Asturias, burning to regenerate pasture has come to cause 70% of ignitions (Report C, Science and Technology Office of the Spanish Congress). So the political claim that “80% are intentional” really does not hold up.

The decisive nuance is summed up by researcher Víctor Resco de Dios: the origin of the spark does not determine how the fire evolves; what is decisive is the amount of fuel, its continuity and its dryness (Infobae, 15 July 2026). Chasing ignitions is necessary, but secondary. There will always be sparks. The goal is not a landscape without ignitions, which is impossible, but a landscape where an ignition cannot turn into a catastrophe. And that is why we come back to the idea we mentioned earlier: the problem is not the spark, but what the spark finds when it takes hold.

There is also a very slippery narrative that is worth defusing: the one that says “green laws stop us clearing the woods”. It is true that regulatory fragmentation between administrations and certain slow procedures add friction to management. But the deep cause of accumulated fuel is not a law: it is that managing the woods stopped being profitable and people left.

And there is a second politicisation, symmetrical to the first. If one narrative blames everything on environmentalism, another blames everything on the climate. As our firefighter friend points out, “politicians tend to say the fire is worse because of the [climate] conditions, but they don’t say it’s also because of a lack of resources”. The climate is real and a first-order multiplier, as we have seen; but using it as the sole explanation is as tricky as “we have to clear the woods”, because it hides a failure of management and investment that is within our hands. Both narratives serve a tribe; neither describes the whole system.

Who’s who?

The diagnosis above explains why the problem exists materially. But we still need to understand why it persists, even though solutions have been known for years (we break them down further on). And this… is now a question of power. Of mapping stakeholders. Who’s who and who does what on the board.

The economist Mancur Olson (Olson, 1965) described the asymmetry that arises when the costs of a reform are concentrated in a few actors with loud voices, and its benefits spread diffusely among many. The system develops a structural bias against implementing solutions, however solid the evidence in their favour.

On the side of the status quo there is a concentration of interests around the suppression complex, that is, the business of aerial and ground resources and the seasonal campaign apparatus, whose income depends on the 78/12 imbalance. To that economic interest is added a political incentive: the image of the water bomber dousing flames pays off handsomely on television, whereas the success of prevention is far less visible and far less newsworthy.

Facing them, the beneficiaries of prevention are far more diffuse and have less of a voice. It is all of us. The general public, the depopulated rural territory, future generations. And the natural agents of prevention, extensive livestock farmers, are an ageing and disorganised group. We will come back to this strategic point: these groups could, potentially, form a coalition. People who do not mobilise today but who could become the active defence of prevention if they were organised well.

Careful, though, before we go on, let us make a distinction. One thing is the suppression business (the contractors, the resource companies) and quite another are the wildland firefighters out on the hills. The latter do not benefit from the imbalance: if anything, they suffer it. Our firefighter friend told us that the companies holding the subcontract for much of Spain “pay terribly”; in many communities the contracts are temporary, only a few months a year, for around €1,200 a month. She, in one of the better-placed communities, earns €1,500 base and has ended up training “inside a container at 44°C”. And, above all, there are not enough people: “We have 60% of the workforce we should have. There are three of us doing the work of six.” So it seems we have built the best fire-suppression system in the world on top of a precarious workforce that, on top of everything, is asked not to complain.

This testimony sharpens the map. Wildland firefighters are not part of the “suppression business”: they are a second diffuse labour group with barely a voice, just like the livestock farmers. Two groups that hold the system up on the ground and have no power to defend what suits them. And there is an asymmetry of visibility that explains almost everything: the politician can appear every day in the photo “on the front line”, but, as our friend puts it, “they don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality of today and of the coming years”.

As pivotal actors, ones that could shift between positions, we should note the insurance sector, which bears growing losses from fire and could align with prevention, and the municipalities of the wildland-urban interface. And, of course, we have the formal-power dimension of this whole map: the division of competences between the State, the autonomous communities and local authorities (Law 43/2003 on Forests; El Independiente). Within the Spanish State apparatus there is a fragmentation that produces a regressive distribution of capacity, because the comarcas (districts) at greatest risk and most depopulated are, almost always, those with the least management capacity.

This already leaves us with some ideas we will pick up again in ACTIVE: before expecting prevention to have defenders, we have to build the coalition that will defend it. And those who might oppose the solutions, we must bring into the debate and the co-creation. Align ourselves. Look at what compensations can be designed, instead of presenting change as a threat.

What solutions already exist?

Let us now map the solutions that already exist. A bit of benchmarking. With a critical eye, mind you, acknowledging their trade-offs too.

Firebreaks

The popular demand for “more firebreaks, and bigger ones, like in the old days” carries a confusion. The fact is that today there are several kinds of firebreaks, and not all are as visible as the traditional ones. The classic linear firebreak (faja cortafuegos) leaves the soil bare; modern forest engineering prefers the fuelbreak area (área cortafuegos), which does not remove all the vegetation but treats and reduces it, often keeping trees. There are even so-called green firebreaks: strips planted with low-flammability, high-moisture species (sometimes maintained with grazing or crops) that slow the fire without leaving the soil bare (Basotec). It is worth saying, because it dismantles the hoax mentioned earlier: it is not that “green laws” ban firebreaks; it is that the technique itself has evolved towards more vegetated, more effective solutions. In fact, the study of the 2025 fires found no evidence that protected areas burned disproportionately (Repeto-Deudero et al., 2025).

Against today’s fires, the big linear firebreak fails for three reasons. First: large fires jump it through ember projection, throwing burning material hundreds of metres ahead of the front. The case of Lloret de Mar in 1979, with twenty-one people killed, is the tragic reminder (The Conversation). Second, and counter-intuitively: a strip of bare soil can increase risk locally, because the sun dries the ground, the wind picks up speed and the fine grass that regrows is even more flammable. Third: it stops neither crown fires nor convective ones. And a fourth factor… leaving the woods bare increases, once summer passes and the rains come, the risk of landslides and destructive torrents of water that meet no obstacle in their path.

Even so, traditional firebreaks (the linear kind) have an operational value. They serve as a support line and access route so that suppression teams can work safely. They are infrastructure for suppression, not for prevention. Like emergency surgery. They are not so useful for prevention, for the reasons above, and because fire has an element of unpredictability that… where do you operate before the harm occurs? That is why the technique evolves from the linear firebreak to treated fuelbreak areas.

The technique has also evolved further, into strategic management points, placed according to how fire behaves across the territory, to modify its spread rather than to stop it at a single point. It is worth explaining well what they are, because this is where the intelligence of the model lies. The idea is this: large fires do not spread at random, but tend to repeat the same routes (the same slopes, the same wind corridors, the same watersheds) according to the topography and the wind regime of each comarca. Fire analysts study those historical and behavioural patterns, and place the interventions (a prescribed burn, a fuelbreak area, a grazing mosaic) precisely at the few points where, if the fire loses intensity there, it changes the outcome of the whole fire. It is not, then, about “clearing” a lot of territory, but about treating little and in exactly the right place. It is the difference between watering the whole field and watering only the root. Its relationship to the firebreak is direct: a strategic management point can take the form of a fuelbreak area (even in the shape of those linear firebreaks we spoke about), but placed with fire-behaviour criteria, not as a straight line on the map. It is the paradigm shift of the Catalan model (Rifà and Castellnou, 2007): the more effective we are at putting fires out, the bigger fires end up becoming; and that is why we must reintroduce fire, in a controlled way, as a tool.

The mosaic landscape

The mosaic is the leap of scale that the firebreak cannot make: from the line to the territory. It is a property of the whole landscape, a tapestry of tiles with different flammability and moisture (green crops, pastures grazed to the ground, thinned woodland, damp valley bottoms, some scrub). They are arranged so as to break the continuity of the fuel, both horizontally and vertically.

It works because fire feeds on continuity. In a homogeneous landscape, a front accumulates energy unchecked; in a mosaic, it collides again and again with tiles that burn poorly, loses intensity and opens opportunities for suppression. It is a landscape that is self-limiting by design. If the firebreak was a tourniquet or an emergency amputation, the mosaic is a healthy circulatory system.

The thing is that this mosaic was not natural, it was produced by the work of the countryside, as we said before. To remake it, do not count on a job that is contracted and finished, but rather an ongoing management. It falls to us to reactivate a living rural activity. That is why the projects that work are economic before they are technical: Ramats de foc in Catalonia (a meat and dairy label tied to preventive grazing) (Pau Costa Foundation), the Andalusian Network of Grazing-Firebreak Areas (RAPCA), Mosaico Extremadura or Gran Canaria Pastorea.

Of course, like all solutions, it has its limits: you cannot turn the whole country into a mosaic, and no landscape guarantees safety on the days of most extreme weather. The mosaic reduces the frequency of large fires and makes them more governable. It helps us manage the risk, but it is not an absolute vaccine.

Extensive livestock grazing

The mechanism is of an almost offensive simplicity: the animal eats the fine fuel, which is precisely what spreads the fire and gives it speed. A grazing flock keeps a fuelbreak area or a tile of the mosaic in check at a tiny cost, and produces food on top of that. It is a living firebreak that maintains itself (Pau Costa Foundation).

So why does this solution not take hold? The problem, again, is economic and institutional more than technical. The prevention service the livestock farmer provides is a public good that the market has not, so far, paid for. Add to that the low profitability of grazing, the lack of generational renewal, conflicts with wildlife, a CAP that does not properly reward environmental services, and degraded infrastructure (drovers’ roads and watering points, for example).

On the other hand, grazing as a solution also has its tensions. Overgrazing is the mirror image of abandonment: too much stocking compacts the soil, erodes and pollutes. So, if it is to be implemented as a solution, the right stocking rate must be matched to the right place. There is also the tension with biodiversity, which is more subtle: grazing protects open habitats and their fauna, threatened precisely by abandonment, but the very scrub that is reduced for safety can be the habitat of specialist species; depending on the specific practices, grazing generates “services or disservices” (Campos and Regos, 2025, Ecological Applications). And finally, pastoral fire closes a far-from-virtuous circle: the same culture that offers the solution carries one of the causes (those sparks that, in today’s context, get out of control with greater probability).

The right answer, probably, runs through regularisation: legal, supervised and planned pastoral burns. Turning the shepherd into an active manager of fire. Into an ally of the landscape.

Making use of biomass

Making use of biomass, like the other solutions, can also be a double-edged sword. The criterion that separates a good biomass strategy from a bad one is what drives the cutting.

A sustainable strategy is one in which energy is the tail of a management that would happen anyway: the residues of thinnings, prunings and clearings that have to be carried out to prevent fires. In other words, energy recovery sits at the bottom of the waste hierarchy (it is the last of the famous “R’s”). Here the fuel removed for safety turns into a product. Fire prevention and energy generation point in the same direction. An unsustainable cutting inverts this priority: it is energy demand that drives the felling. In the worst case, we can witness the conversion of diverse forests into fast-growing monocultures (which increase fire risk), or into models like the transatlantic pellets (National Geographic).

The underlying concept is the carbon debt: cutting and burning releases all the stored carbon today, and the replacement tree takes decades to reabsorb it. That is why the European RED III directive tightened the criteria and regulated cascading use: wood goes first to its highest-value use, and energy is left as a last resort for what cannot be otherwise used (RETEMA).

But of course, every context is different, and there are nuances that make Spain a different case from the Nordic or North American debate. If the material extracted is genuinely a residue of the preventive management that has to be done anyway, not leaving it in the woods is not only sustainable but reduces the risk. The danger for Spain is not so much its current model as importing the logic of energy demand. Well designed, a biomass strategy makes prevention self-financing.

A map of the future

So far we have read the system as it is. But before designing a strategy, a blueprint, let us look to the future. Let us do a speculative exercise. It is not about getting the future right (nobody can predict it exactly), but about exploring several scenarios, to keep our strategy from being left at the mercy of uncertain futures.

In truth, for this blueprint, we do not run as dense a futures exercise as we might for other cases. Why? Most of the portfolio of solutions is already robust in almost any plausible future. But even so, we must bring to light scenarios that no plan has yet reckoned with.

Signals, forces, uncertainties

A sweep of signals (what in foresight we at Monnou call a SETAP scan: socio-cultural, economic, technological, environmental and political-legal) makes it possible to separate the background forces from those that can really fork the future. From that sweep, two critical uncertainties stand out, the ones that combine high impact and high uncertainty.

The first is the vitality of rural life: do we keep heading towards emptying out, or is there a real revitalisation? The signal is genuinely ambiguous. The trend towards depopulation dominates (around 1,840 localities at risk of irreversible depopulation, according to various studies on rural life compiled by BBVA). But there is a post-pandemic counter-signal of new inhabitants and remote work; for now unable to counter the structural imbalances, but worth keeping on the map. The second is the fire regime: an intensification that is still governable, or the crossing of an ungovernability threshold in which mega-fires sustainedly exceed any suppression capacity?

Beyond these critical uncertainties, we have some forces of high impact but low uncertainty. Trends with a fairly clear direction, which act as the backdrop to any scenario. On one hand, the continued ageing of the rural population; on the other, the climatic intensification of the danger.

Scenarios

Crossing those two axes, we generate four futures.

Managing the decline (abandonment, but fire still governable) is the prolonged present, a kind of business as usual.

Living mosaic (revitalisation and governable fire) is the future this blueprint pursues, as the most desirable.

Living with fire (revitalisation but ungovernable fire) would force a deeper adaptation. On one hand, developing a fire culture: accepting, as a society, that fire is part of our Mediterranean landscapes and that the goal is not to eliminate it but to live with it: to stop seeing it only as an enemy to put out and start using it as a tool. Second, developing universal self-protection: shifting part of the responsibility to inhabited territory: homes with defensible materials and perimeters, developments with evacuation routes, safety strips around settlements, neighbourhoods that know what to do when the smoke arrives (it is, moreover, the measure that saves the most lives per euro, even though it does not prevent the fire). And finally, implementing normalised prescribed burning. So that burning in a planned and controlled way, in the right conditions and calendar, stops being a cause for suspicion and becomes a habitual but well-regulated practice, as it already is in Portugal or in much of North America.

And finally, the sacrifice territory scenario (abandonment and ungovernability at once) is the one nobody wants to draw: a dystopian scenario (but not implausible).

In that fourth scenario, mega-fires exceed any suppression capacity across wide depopulated areas, and the correct logic stops being “defend the whole territory” and moves to triage and managed retreat: concentrating the defence on inhabited settlements and critical interfaces, and accepting (even planning) fire in indefensible country. No plan contemplates it, because nobody wants it. But it is plausible enough to prepare, cold and in advance, a territorial triage protocol. The word triage comes from emergency medicine: when there are more wounded than doctors, someone decides, with criteria agreed in advance, who is attended to first. Applied to fire, it means deciding cold (not improvising under the smoke, but carefully studied beforehand) what is always defended (the villages, the people, the critical infrastructure). And which country, if there are not resources for everything, is left to burn as safely as possible, channelling the fire instead of confronting it where it cannot be won. It is a very hard decision, even costly in terms of political image… but the protocol is necessary.

How will we know if we are approaching that future? There are two signals worth monitoring: the frequency of fires that exceed suppression capacity, and the demographic trajectory of high-risk comarcas. If both indicators worsen at once, the sacrifice territory takes shape as an ever more probable scenario. And the protocol has to be ready. Watching those signals is what keeps the strategy we design alive.

ACTIVATE: designing out fire, by policy

If EXPLORE was about understanding the system, ACTIVE is about taking a stance: composing, out of everything above, a strategy and putting it to the test. Let us honestly recall that we have not run a co-creation process with multiple actors here. This is a modest proposal, supported by the analysis and validated with a few people in the sector. A starting point for others to pick up, not a closed plan.

Designing rural policy as wildfire policy

It is easier said than done, but there it is: the best wildfire policy for Spain is a good rural policy. The drivers of the problem (abandonment, fuel build-up, homogenisation of the landscape) are rural and economic phenomena, not meteorological accidents. We have already described what prevents fire: population anchored in rural territory, extensive livestock farming that is alive and controlled, forests where biomass has a value, diverse landscapes… Almost all of it resolves depopulation, rural employment and conservation at once. A model based only on suppression, by contrast, mortgages the coming summers to save this one.

An environmental service, valued economically

How do we carry out this policy effectively? If we have to point to a single lever, it is perhaps payment for ecosystem services, understood not as a subsidy but as the fair price of a public service that today someone provides for free. For decades we have treated rural areas as a weak territory to be “helped”, to be subsidised, a paternalistic approach that, moreover, disappears with the first budget cut. Paying for the service inverts the logic: the rural world provides prevention, water, biodiversity and carbon in the soil, and society pays for it a contracted, verifiable price (The Conversation). The best-documented case is Gran Canaria Pastorea: in 2023, the island council paid 34 livestock-farming families to manage 2,269 hectares of preventive pasture (Red Estatal de Montes Públicos).

There is a detail that makes payment for ecosystem services something more than an economic instrument: it is a tool for building relationships. For building coalition. Let us go back to that stakeholder map. Prevention was failing, in part, because it had no one to defend it. Well, this lever turns a diffuse, inactive beneficiary, the isolated livestock farmer, into an organised actor with a direct interest in prevention being maintained. It increases that group’s capacity to organise in defence of the solutions.

So that a scheme like this does not degenerate into clientelism or bureaucracy, we propose four design principles: (i) pay by result (fuel kept below a threshold in the strategic areas) and not by presence; (ii) include cheap verification with satellite and LiDAR remote sensing; (iii) offer a single window and minimal paperwork, because bureaucracy drives out precisely those you want to retain; and (iv) establish a ring-fenced multi-year horizon, because prevention pays off over the medium term and its worst enemy is the swing of annual budgets.

And then there is the basic human factor, that of the firefighting team. Turning the suppression workforce, today often seasonal and precarious, into stable brigades all year round. That way, the same teams would do prevention in winter (clearing, prescribed burns, maintenance of fuelbreak areas) and suppression in summer. It is a single decision that fixes both labour precarity and the prevention deficit at once, and that points in the same direction as Law 5/2024, the basic law on wildland firefighters (BOE), when it calls for professionalising and stabilising the corps. The wildland firefighter stops being a seasonal expense and becomes an active agent of both prevention and suppression.

A layered design

A coherent plan works on three layers at once.

The landscape layer: the what, a socio-environmental matter. Rebuilding the mosaic with grazing, managed forest, prescribed burning and treated fuelbreak areas (not the linear firebreaks, but the treated areas), plus the self-protection of the wildland-urban interface, which is the measure that saves the most lives per euro even though it does not prevent the fire.

The economic layer: how to sustain the economic balance. Payment for ecosystem services, complemented with value chains (labels such as “fire meat”, cascading biomass, timber, resin) and fiscal instruments and European funds oriented to risk.

And the governance layer: the who and the how to make it last. It is in this third layer that much of good policy dies. Forest management is a competence of the autonomous communities (Law 43/2003 on Forests). This has a virtue: it allows the strategy to be adapted to each territory. But the flip side is a fragmentation that produces seventeen models, incoherent data and that regressive distribution of capacity we already discussed. The fragmentation, moreover, does not stop at the regional borders: it reaches inside each community. Our firefighter friend describes it in hers: “the three provinces are very different, each depends on different things, the units are run differently”. In one there is an internal war between urban and forest firefighters; in another, “it is all chaos”. If that happens within a single community, imagine the whole.

Designing governance

Probably, the most effective design does not run through recentralisation. That is neither constitutionally possible nor, probably, desirable. It runs more through strengthening coordination. This can take shape in the following ways.

Common minimum floors for preventive investment. A percentage of spending on prevention below which no administration may fall, set as a common minimum for all, without thereby invading each community’s management. Define that floor: you can do more, but not less.

A single satellite-anchored data system. Today MITECO and the European EFFIS/Copernicus system give different, not always comparable figures, and you cannot manage well what is not measured the same way. A single, homogeneous, near-real-time system would make it possible to know what works and where to invest.

State co-financing weighted by risk and capacity. The point is to correct a regressive distribution. “Regressive” means that those who have least end up bearing proportionally more of the load, or receiving less support. With fires that is exactly what happens: the comarcas at greatest risk tend to be the most depopulated and the poorest, that is, those with the least capacity to pay for their own prevention. Weighting State support by risk and capacity means that public money goes in greater proportion to those comarcas, to correct the imbalance rather than aggravate it.

Execution at local and comarcal scale. The strategy can be designed from the institutions (it should be done in a participatory way, in any case). But it materialises at ground level, where the grazing contracts, the prescribed burns and the self-protection of villages actually happen. The comarca (an intermediate scale between the municipality and the autonomous community) tends to be the right size to coordinate all of that.

Prevention funding ring-fenced against the electoral cycle. So that prevention money is not the first line cut when hard times come, nor depends on the scare of the last summer. Does this require a State Pact? It is one way, but not the only one, and it is not without risks: in a highly polarised society, a grand pact can end up in a drawer. There are less grandiloquent and sometimes more resilient formulas: multi-year ring-fenced funds (money that can only be spent on prevention and is approved for several years), legal safeguards, or territorial agreements between communities. The political conversation is already open, and not only from the parties: in the summer of 2026, the Pau Costa Foundation launched the petition “Act before, not after: five commitments in the face of forest fires”, addressed to the Government, Congress and the autonomous communities, and backed by WWF Spain, Greenpeace, COSE and other conservation and sector organisations. It demands precisely what this blueprint defends: permanent, coordinated commitments, beyond the summer campaigns and the political cycles, to move from reaction to prevention. What we are seeing is civil society asking to ring-fence prevention, from the bottom up.

None of this necessarily requires additional economic investment. It requires, first of all, correcting the 78/12 budget imbalance. Every euro that shifts from late suppression to early prevention yields tens of euros saved and, moreover, anchors population all year round, not just for one season.

What could go wrong?

We all have our biases. We, as designers of any proposal, do too. So let us try to demolish our own analysis. It is what, in methodological terms, we call a red team, which provides resistance to error.

The strongest counterargument is that on days of extreme weather, the ones that produce the mega-fires, even the well-managed landscape burns, and in 2025 managed areas burned too. If the climate has crossed certain thresholds, the value of prevention relative to suppression could be overestimated precisely in the zones and days of greatest severity. How could we incorporate this point? The realistic goal is not “zero fires”, but moving from a regime of ungovernable mega-fires to one of fires the system can absorb.

Which actors might we have left outside the map? At least two with the capacity to oppose: some environmental groups that oppose prescribed burning or grazing in certain protected areas, and the interface’s development interests, which push to keep building (expanding the built-up area) in high-risk zones.

What assumption do the four scenarios share? That the State retains fiscal and operational capacity; none contemplates a budgetary collapse. And what could happen to make the main lever fail? That prescribed burning turned out to be legally unviable at scale, because of the liability regime for escapes, or that grazing could not be made viable even with payment for services, for an absolute lack of generational renewal. Again, let us build this into the analysis.

What is the “liability regime for escapes”? When a prescribed burn is carried out and the fire escapes the planned zone, who answers for the damage? Today, in many cases, liability falls so personally and diffusely on whoever lights it (the technician, the ranger, the livestock farmer themselves) that almost no one wants to take it on, even if the burn is a good idea and well done. That fear of liability holds back the cheapest and most effective prevention tool. Without a framework that shares that risk reasonably (insurance, protocols, public cover for authorised burns), prescribed burning at scale stays on paper.

The biggest obstacle, however, is temporal. Rebuilding a mosaic and a rural fabric takes more than a decade; the cost is immediate and visible, and the benefit is invisible and deferred in time. That is the ultimate reason why, despite the solidity of certain diagnoses, public policy struggles to apply it. It is not a problem of knowledge, but of risk-taking and institutional design.

An additional warning: rebalancing is not dismantling. Shifting resources towards prevention does not mean weakening suppression, which will remain indispensable for the days when the mosaic is not enough. In fact, as our friend reminded us, suppression is not even well resourced today at the level of the human team. It is about ceasing to systematically sacrifice prevention, not about inverting the error in the opposite direction. After all, and in our friend’s words, whoever is out on the hills does it for a reason: “You save a village, you save animals and vegetation, you save a mountain.”

Source audit. To make the analysis more robust, we carry out a source audit, because they all have an interest behind them. The 78/12 figure comes from ASEMFO, the forestry-sector employers’ association, whose interest coincides with the conclusion that figure supports: it has to be triangulated (the ministry corroborates the direction; the exact figure should be taken with caution). By contrast, the record burned area is published by the Government itself, which it does not favour: it is testimony against interest and, for that reason, more robust. With that criterion, we close by labelling the confidence of each piece of information: we have high confidence for the role of abandonment and fuel as a structural driver, and for the mosaic, grazing and payment for services being no-regret moves; medium for the exact budget ratios; and clearly low for the viability of prescribed burning at national scale and for the “sacrifice territory” scenario. So we see how some of the hypotheses on which our analysis rests are more robust than others.

IMPULSE: seeds to inspire change

IMPULSE would be, in methodological terms, the moment to materialise. To make tangible and evaluate the real impact. To give shape to concrete experiences, tools and infrastructures, and to evaluate their impact for real, collectively and audited. That is beyond a studio like ours. So here we do what is within our reach: turn the analysis into inspiring seeds, so that someone (you, perhaps) picks up the baton and takes it to their venture, to a call for proposals, to a town council or to a business plan.

Seeds to materialise the blueprint

1. Prevention contract. A public-private platform that contracts livestock farmers and landowners for a verifiable result (fuel below a threshold in the strategic areas), not for presence. It is payment for ecosystem services turned into a product, with minimal paperwork.
2. Fuel data mining. A remote-sensing service (satellite and LiDAR) that measures fuel load and structure at low cost. It is the piece that makes it possible to pay by result at scale, and defuses the old objection about fraud.
3. “Fire meat”, at scale. A territorial brand and a short supply chain that put the preventive value of grazing on the market, in the style of Ramats de foc, with traceability of the hectares protected. The consumer pays, in part, for prevention.
4. Fire managers. Prescribed-burning cooperatives that train, certify and insure shepherds and crews to carry out low-intensity fire legally and in a planned way. Turning fire culture from a problem into a service.
5. Cascading biomass, locally sourced. A local logistics operation that collects the residues of preventive management and directs them first to their highest-value use. Prevention that finances itself.
6. Self-protection of the urban interface. A home and defensible-space assessment service for developments in risk zones, tied to an insurance product. Here the insurance sector, that pivotal actor, becomes an ally.
7. The prevention coalition. An observatory or alliance that organises the diffuse beneficiaries (livestock farmers, rural municipalities, insurers) and gives them a political voice. The stakeholder-map move, made real. There are already movements in this direction: the Pau Costa Foundation’s “Act before, not after” petition, which brings together conservation foundations, foresters and livestock farmers around five State-level commitments, is a seed of that coalition already germinating.

The way to bring it all together might be a demonstrator comarca. A high-risk territory where the complete model is prototyped (mosaic, payment for services and coordinated governance), with the key indicators well monitored. It could be the kind of project that fits a FEADER, LIFE or Next Generation call, and that produces evidence to scale.

Key messages

We also leave you a few key messages, in case they help take the idea to others:

• The problem is not the spark, but what the spark finds along the way.
• Right now we have fewer sparks, but more surface burns for each one.
• The best wildfire policy is a good rural policy.
• We do not pay €200 to prevent a hectare, and then we pay €20,000 to put it out.
• Pay for the service, do not subsidise a weakness.
• Rebalancing the budget (prevention/suppression) is not dismantling.
• The water bomber is a media image; the mosaic, more invisible, is a more effective solution.

A summary of this blueprint? A country does not stop burning by putting fires out faster, but by changing the conditions of the landscape so that the fire, when it comes (and it will), does not find the motorway we lay out for it today. That is the spark we do want to light: the change of landscape, and the change of mindset. Let yourself catch light, and let us keep designing a new world.

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References

Peer-reviewed and academic literature

Campos, J. C. & Regos, A. (2025). Unveiling the Effects of Landscape–Fire Interactions on Functional Diversity in a Southern European Mountain. Ecological Applications, 35(1), e3059. DOI

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Repeto-Deudero, I., et al. (2025). Record-Breaking 2025 European Wildfires Concentrated in a Small Fraction of the Territory. Global Change Biology. DOI

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MITECO. Advance report on forest fires 2025 (Avance informativo de incendios forestales 2025) (data on burned area and large forest fires). Link

Law 5/2024, of 8 November, the basic law on wildland firefighters (BOE-A-2024-23272). Full text

Law 43/2003, of 21 November, on Forests (division of competences State–regions–local). Full text

Royal Decree-Law 15/2022, of 1 August, on urgent measures regarding forest fires. BOE-A-2022-12926. Full text

MITECO. Wildfire statistics and advance reports. Link

Science and Technology Office of the Spanish Congress of Deputies (Oficina C). Report C: Forest fires and restoration of burned areas. Link

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Science Media Centre España (March 2026). The 2025 fires burned more than one million hectares in the EU (JRC/EFFIS data; concentration of burned area in large fires). Link

UGT Servicios Públicos (union) (2025). One year of Law 5/2024, the basic law on wildland firefighters: uneven application across communities. Link

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Infobae (15 July 2026). 95% of fires in Spain are of human origin (statements by V. Resco de Dios). Link

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forescat. Evolution of the prevention and suppression budget for fires in Spain, 2000–2024. Link

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Testimony from a wildland firefighter in the Valencian Community, personal communication, July 2026.