Source: The Conversation – UK
A wildfire needs a name long before anyone knows what caused it. When the pines of the Gironde in southwestern France caught light in July, the fire was being reported within hours under the name of the ground it was burning. By the time it had taken 40,000 hectares, that name was fixed in every bulletin in Europe.
The investigation into how it started took longer, and the scientists working out why it ran so far took longer still, publishing into a news cycle that had already moved on.
Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks.
Hours: the place
The name comes first, into an almost complete absence of information, and the word we reach for while we wait is “wildfire”.
It is a strange choice for Europe, where the human share of ignitions is put at roughly 97%. In the whole run of British fire service records, lightning has been logged as the cause of three wildfires, two of which turned out to be the same fire. This is why a 2024 parliamentary briefing stated flatly that almost all UK wildfires are started by people.
The defence is that “wild” never meant natural: a review of wildfire terminology across the international glossaries confirms it denotes an unplanned, uncontrolled vegetation fire, “whether natural or human-caused”. But nobody consults a glossary before reading a headline, and in that first vacant hour “wild” places the fire outside human society. It implies there was no spark – and certainly no humans.
While the UK and much of Europe have no official naming conventions, the way fires are named tends to produce much the same outcome as the more formally codified American system. In the US, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s data standard states that names must reference nearby geography, and “should not identify responsible parties or otherwise imply culpability or liability”, with “Powerline” and “Pipeline” given as banned examples.
So when a Pacific Gas and Electric Company line dropped into dry brush in California in 2018 and 85 people died, and the company pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter, it was named “the Camp Fire”, after Camp Creek Road. One of the century’s defining powerline fires, remembered as a road.
Days: the spark
Then the investigators report and the vacuum fills, which in Europe happens quickly, because so many fires are obviously human-caused that the question of how they started rarely stays unanswered for long. The correction makes things worse rather than better: the story does not widen from the name towards the drought that let the fire run, but narrows onto the person with the lighter, or the careless outdoor cook.
In response to the UK’s summer of wildfires, new prime minister Andy Burnham has largely avoided talking about systemic climate change but has urged shops not to sell disposable BBQs. In doing so he’s targeting the spark, but not the conditions that have made disposable BBQs so destructive this summer.
After Spain’s catastrophic 2025 season, the opposition Partido Popular’s flagship proposal was a national register of arsonists while the prime minister proposed a climate emergency plan. And when I wrote here last month about how the French media were framing this summer’s fires, the replies filled with cries of arson. The claim spread far enough that Reuters fact-checked posts citing France’s own figure that 90% of fires are human-started as proof that climate change isn’t real.
“Wild” says there was no spark; “arson” says there was nothing but a spark. Both are arguments about ignition, and neither reaches the heat, the drought and the fuel dryness that turn a dropped match into a firestorm. The arson frame buries the climate story so effectively precisely because it is partly true.
Weeks: the conditions
The true cause of the devastation arrives last, if at all. Scientists put the weather conditions behind July’s fires at twice as likely in France and 20 times likelier in Spain than in a world without human warming. A finding published weeks after the name, and days after the argument about who lit it.
Media coverage doesn’t do well with such a lag. A review of 12,000 Canadian news stories found 16.5% of wildfire reporting mentioned climate change, against 35% for extreme heat. The spark is reportable in a paragraph. The conditions require specialist knowledge.
New naming conventions
Britain had its worst fire year on record in 2025, Europe burned over a million hectares, and what we will have kept of it is a list of locations. Fixing that means naming both causes in the order they matter rather than the order they arrive. We should consider retiring “wildfire” in favour of “landscape fire”, stating the spark once it is known and explaining the conditions that allowed it to spread.
In 2023, Greece’s then climate crisis minister showed how briefly it can be done, observing of one bad season that most fires were ignited by human hand, through negligence or intent and that what differed from previous years was an unprecedented heatwave. Spark and conditions, in a single sentence.
Doug Specht does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/13/theres-nothing-wild-about-most-wildfires-humans-start-them-and-have-made-them-more-dangerous/