Fire raged in the Massif des Corbières, in the eastern foothills of the French Pyrenees, exactly where a previous fire burnt about 16,000 hectares of land to ashes in August 2025. To this day, it's been the biggest wildfire France has seen since 1949. With about 2,000 hectares of farmland burnt, local farmers were among the most affected.

Changing panorama

For decades, vineyards have helped contain the spread of fire and protect houses and villages.

“Vineyards act like a firewall, as the plants aren't easily inflammable,” Damien Onorre, president of the winegrowers' association in the Aude department of the Occitania region in southern France, explained to The European Correspondent.

These fire-breakers, however, are disappearing.

The wine industry has seen better days: demand is decreasing, and farmers are shifting to other agriculture practices or simply giving up. This has led to an extensive “grubbing up” – a process of clearing out the vines.

“Up until the 1980s, there were vineyards around all the cities of the region; their disappearance leaves us with a higher risk of wildfire,” Jean-Paul Baylac, the head of the local fire department, told a French news agency shortly after last year's massive fire.

In Aude, roughly 10,000 hectares of vineyards – about the size of Paris – disappeared over the course of two years, leaving behind abandoned plots of land prone to wildfires.

From firewall to fire fuel

In the era of intensive agriculture and biodiversity loss, returning farmlands to nature sounds like an obvious good. But it's not that simple – you can't just stop farming and expect nature to do the rest.

When drying up under the sun, vegetation becomes fuel for wildfires. The risk grows even bigger if such areas multiply and connect, creating a continuous landscape.

Across the Western Mediterranean, more than 560,000 hectares of land burnt to ashes in 2025 – twice the size of Luxembourg, and more than half of the total burnt area in Europe in 2025.

This has an impact on the regional economy. Between 2011 and 2018, Southern Europe lost €14-21 billion in production value each year due to wildfires, according to a 2023 study by the University of Birmingham.

Cutting the grass once a year helps avoid accumulation of vegetation, but that's expensive at about €200 per hectare per year. “That is why we ask for substantial support to maintain these abandoned areas,” Onorre admits. “We simply can't afford it alone.”

Fallow land exit plan

Another way is to avoid abandoning farmland, creating “fallow land”, in the first place.

To help prevent wildfires, the regional land management agency of Occitania (SAFER Occitanie) developed IZIFRICHE, an app that uses satellite images and AI to identify all agricultural wasteland. It's become part of the firefighting plan the local authorities set up, and more regions in France plan to start using it.

Should all fallow land necessarily revert to agricultural land? Not really, explained Gilles Le François, SAFER collaborator and head of the regional commission for wasteland management: “What it will become depends on its location, soil quality, and overall economic value.”

Fertile soil could be turned back into cropland, whereas an infertile plot near a forest or close to a wetland could be returned to its natural state.

The best option

Vineyards aren't the only natural firebreaks: fruit orchards and pastureland can slow wildfire spread too. In fact, the more diverse the landscape, the higher its resilience, according to a report from the European Civil Protection Knowledge Network. Animal grazing along open areas can also play a role by keeping vegetation under control and reducing the fuel available for fires.

Restoring abandoned land could pay off in more ways than one. A recent study in the Geres-Xures cross-border nature reserve between Spain and Portugal found that one of the best approaches against wildfires is to avoid a landscape that is either fully abandoned, fully forested, or fully farmed.

A mix of farmland and pasture can break up continuous vegetation, while native forests, such as oak-forest in this case, can limit wildfire damage compared to more flammable tree cover. According to the researchers, this approach would bring the most socio-economic benefits to the region.

Turning that vision into reality, however, is a bit harder. Land ownership is fragmented; farmers and foresters don't always work together, and municipalities often lack the money for such a comprehensive fire fighting scheme to be put in place, another study suggests. For Le François, the challenge is more about getting everyone from municipalities to landowners around the same table.