In 2025, landscape fires emerged as one of the most persistent and underestimated systemic risks in the Western Balkans. Prolonged heatwaves, drought conditions, land abandonment and limited institutional capacity combined to produce one of the most severe regional fire seasons of the past decade. While fire severity fluctuates from year to year, the trends observed in 2025 point to a deeper, structural challenge that demands coordinated, long-term solutions rather than short-term crisis response.
A severe fire season by the numbers
According to European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) estimates, approximately 225,000 hectares burned across the Western Balkans during the 2025 fire season, with more than 430 large fires (≥30 ha) recorded across the region. Fire activity intensified sharply from late May onwards, driven by prolonged drought, repeated heatwaves and persistently high fire danger levels.
Country-level impacts highlight the scale and uneven distribution of losses:
- Bosnia and Herzegovina: around 135 large fires, affecting approximately 38,000 hectares, particularly in Herzegovina and karstic mountainous areas.
- Serbia: an estimated 191 fires, burning roughly 27,900 hectares, including forest edges and agricultural landscapes in central and southern regions.
- Montenegro: about 133 fires, with nearly 27,700 hectares burned, especially in inland plateaus and coastal hinterlands.
- North Macedonia: approximately 82 fires, affecting over 31,000 hectares, driven largely by grassland and shrub fires spreading into forested terrain.
- Albania: around 132 fires, burning nearly 60,000 hectares, making it one of the most heavily affected countries in relative terms.
- Kosovo*: an estimated 115 fires, with roughly 16,800 hectares burned.
Beyond burned area, the impacts were tangible for communities and infrastructure. In Albania, July 2025 fires led to the temporary evacuation of around 2,000 people as fast-moving fronts approached settlements. Across the region, fires disrupted power supply, closed roads and damaged agricultural land, grazing areas and protected natural sites. While fatalities remained limited compared to some Mediterranean countries, the economic and environmental costs were substantial.
What 2025 taught us: five key lessons
The 2025 season did not just bring extreme impacts – it also reinforced several critical lessons about how wildfire risk is evolving in the The 2025 season did not just bring extreme impacts – it also reinforced several critical lessons about how wildfire risk is evolving in the Western Balkans.
Lesson 1: Climate change is amplifying fire risk faster than preparedness
Rising temperatures and longer dry periods are extending the fire season beyond traditional summer peaks. In 2025, fires increasingly occurred in spring and early autumn, stretching firefighting resources designed for shorter, more predictable seasons. During peak heatwaves, temperatures exceeded 40°C in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and North Macedonia, reducing suppression effectiveness and allowing fires to spread rapidly. The pace at which climate risk is increasing continues to outstrip institutional adaptation.
Lesson 2: Human activity remains the dominant ignition source
Despite worsening climatic conditions, around 90% of fires in 2025 were human-caused. Agricultural residue burning, pasture management fires escaping control, waste burning and infrastructure-related sparks (notably from power lines during high winds) accounted for the majority of ignitions. In areas affected by depopulation and land abandonment, traditional land-use practices have disappeared without being replaced by structured vegetation management. Wildfires in the Western Balkans are therefore as much a governance and land-management challenge as they are a natural hazard.
Lesson 3: Cross-border fires require cross-border solutions
Several 2025 fire events once again spread across national borders, particularly in mountainous and forested areas. Fragmented national systems limit early detection, real-time data sharing, and coordinated suppression. As fires increasingly affect multiple countries simultaneously, regional cooperation is no longer optional – it is essential for effective prevention, preparedness, and response. Strengthening cross-border capacity is therefore critical. This includes joint training exercises, shared risk assessments, harmonised early warning systems, and improved communication protocols between neighbouring countries. In this regard, the LFMP contributes by supporting institutional capacity building, facilitating knowledge exchange, and fostering operational cooperation among fire management authorities across the region. By investing in shared skills, systems, and coordination mechanisms, the region is better prepared to prevent, manage, and recover from cross-border fire events.
Lesson 4: The cost of inaction: financial vulnerability from landscape fires
Economic losses from landscape fires continue to fall largely on governments, municipalities and households. Insurance coverage for wildfire damage remains very limited across much of the Western Balkans, leaving infrastructure, forestry, agriculture and tourism highly exposed. As burned area and asset exposure grow, reliance on emergency public budgets alone is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Integrating risk financing, insurance solutions and public–private partnerships into fire risk strategies is a critical, yet still underdeveloped, component of resilience
Lesson 5: Why landscape fire management is a long-term approach
Landscape fire management (LFM) is a holistic approach to reducing landscape fire risk by managing fire within the broader ecological, social, and land-use system in which it occurs. LFM addresses the full continuum of fires across different vegetation types, aiming to strengthen their resilience to fire. It integrates prevention, land management, governance, and community engagement. The goal is to prevent small ignitions from becoming large, destructive events while strengthening ecosystem resilience and protecting communities. This approach is particularly essential for the Western Balkans, where most fires are human-caused and fire behavior is strongly influenced by how land is used, maintained, and planned.
Key elements of LFM include:
- Prevention first – reducing fire risk through sustainable land and forest management, fuel reduction, responsible land-use practices, and awareness raising.
- Fuel management – controlling vegetation build-up through grazing, mechanical clearing, or other land use measures
- Landscape planning – creating mosaic landscapes that interrupt fire spread
- Early detection and monitoring – strengthening fire danger assessment, surveillance and rapid response capacity
- Fire preparedness and suppression capacity – ensuring coordinated, well-equipped, and trained firefighting and civil protection systems
- Community involvement – engaging local communities, land users, and volunteers in prevention and preparedness
- Cross-sector coordination – aligning forestry, agriculture, civil protection, environment, and spatial planning institutions
- Post-fire recovery and restoration – restoring ecosystems, stabilizing soils, rehabilitating livelihoods, and reducing future fire risk
- Knowledge, research, and traditional practices – integrating scientific knowledge with traditional and local fire management experience.
By integrating these measures, landscape fire management moves beyond reactive disaster response toward a long-term, system-based strategy. It reduces landscape fire risk while enabling the sustainable and ecologically appropriate role of fire in landscape management, ultimately building safer, more resilient landscapes over time.
Looking ahead
The 2025 fire season confirmed that landscape fires in the Western Balkans are not an episodic or purely seasonal problem. They are a structural risk shaped by climate change, land-use dynamics, and socio-economic trends. The combination of record burned areas, predominantly human-caused ignitions, and increasingly extreme fire weather highlights the limits of reactive firefighting approaches.
Reducing future wildfire losses will require a decisive shift toward prevention as a core component of LFM, combined with integrated landscape management practices, enhanced regional cooperation, and measures to strengthen landscape resilience. Fully operationalising and applying LFM practices offers a clear pathway to translate the hard lessons of 2025 into more resilient landscapes and safer communities across the Western Balkans.
In this context, the SDC’s Landscape Fire Management in the Western Balkans Programme has emerged as a key regional framework for advancing LFM. By 2025, it has supported prevention-focused LFM practices, strengthened regional cooperation, enhanced cross-sectoral knowledge exchange and collaboration, and promoted community-based pilot actions alongside targeted capacity-building initiatives. Implementation across the region has progressed steadily, with stronger alignment between national institutions and regional cooperation mechanisms. Prevention is increasingly recognised as a critical pillar of fire management, gaining visibility and strategic importance alongside emergency response efforts. Embracing LFM approach from prevention and fuel management to landscape planning and post-fire restoration offers the most effective route to resilient ecosystems, safer communities, and a sustainable future for the Western Balkans.