EURAF
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DCKM5KT1e/Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated around Bordeaux and Madrid in recent days, and the damage to homes, land and communities is tragic.
Our thoughts are with everyone affected, and with the firefighters and emergency crews working to bring these fires under control.
Once the immediate crisis passes, there will rightly be a lot of discussion about prevention. There's no single fix - prevention depends on funding, land-use policy, climate action, and long-term investment in rural areas.
🌳 🐐 But one approach that has shown promising results, among several worth discussing, is agroforestry and silvopastoral land management: reintroducing grazing, mixed land use, and active forest thinning into landscapes that have become dense and fuel-heavy after decades of rural depopulation. This is an area EURAF has long followed with interest.
One example worth highlighting is 👉 the Life-Montserrat project (Catalonia, 2014–2018), a case we featured in our report, "Agroforestry as a Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Tool in Europe: Recommendations for Member States."
After major fires in the area in 1986, the pine forest that regenerated became very densely packed (over 50,000 trees/hectare in places) as traditional farming and grazing declined and active land management largely stopped.
By strategically thinning pine density to around 1,000 trees per hectare and using controlled burns with mechanical clearing to reopen pasture, the project restored a diversified agrosilvopastoral landscape. These actions successfully supported new, economically viable livestock operations, including goats, cattle, and donkeys, to graze and maintain the land.
Some results after four years:
✅ Over 1,300 hectares of woodland restored
✅ Grazing agreements across 1,400 hectares of private land
✅ Early positive signs for butterfly and plant biodiversity
✅ A new Montserrat Livestock Farmers' Association, giving local people an ongoing stake in maintaining the landscape
The project itself is careful to note this isn't about preventing all fires, that's neither realistic nor, ecologically, entirely desirable. It's about reducing the risk of the kind of large, uncontrolled fires we're seeing this week, by keeping land actively managed rather than left to accumulate fuel.
We're sharing this not as a silver bullet, but as one example of land-management thinking that deserves more attention and investment as these fire seasons become more frequent.
🔗 Full report:
https://zenodo.org/records/21275959📸 From Life Montserrat picture gallery:
https://www.facebook.com/LifeMontserrat