Beyond the spark: why Britain’s wildfires are getting worse

Wildfires are becoming a familiar and devastating part of the British summer. Yes, they make the news, but the whole story is often missing.

The current wildfires in Conwy are rumoured to have been started by kids throwing fireworks. Sometimes it’s a dropped cigarette. A barbecue left unattended. It’s true that almost all wildfires in the UK are triggered by human activity in one way or another, accidental or deliberate, but the key to this story is not how the fire started, it is why the ground is so ready to burn. 

Fires need three things to get going: fuel, oxygen, and a source of ignition. Humans have always provided plenty of that third ingredient, and always will; cigarettes, barbecues, campfires and careless machinery aren’t going anywhere. What’s changed is the first ingredient: fuel.

The hotter and drier the weather, the drier the scrub, grass and woodland become. Dry vegetation doesn’t just burn more easily, it burns faster, spreads further, and is far harder to bring under control once it’s alight.

A spark that would have fizzled out on damp ground in a normal British summer can now, in tinder-dry conditions, become a fire that spreads across dozens or hundreds of hectares before crews can contain it.

That’s the shift climate change is driving, it’s turning the landscape into fuel.

2025 was the UK’s worst wildfire year since records began, with over 33,000 hectares burned, smashing the previous record set just three years earlier, in 2022. Across Europe more broadly, 2026 has already seen wildfires burn through around 170,000 hectares by early July, well above the long-term average, following the hottest June ever recorded for Western Europe. Scientists have linked the intensity of that heat directly to human-caused climate change.

The real question is how do we combat a hotter, drier climate, driven by the continued burning of fossil fuels. If we want fewer, smaller, less destructive wildfires, tackling the ignition source is only going to be half the job. We must tackle the reason our landscapes are drying out in the first place.