In recent weeks, as wildfires have raged in many parts of the world with over 1,000 in the UK alone from May to August 2026, a fierce debate has blazed over what might be causing or exacerbating them.
While there is largely agreement that the fires are ultimately the result of heatwaves linked directly to climate change, some individuals and organisations have placed blame with nature restoration practices, known as rewilding.
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On 13 August 2026, The Daily Mail ran a front-page headline “Rewilding link to record fires”. The article quoted a number of sources including the Moorland Association (which represents the owners and managers of heather moorland in the UK), the rural campaigning organisation the Countryside Alliance, and Lord Botham, the famous cricketer-turned-fieldsports advocate.
It is a point of view seemingly mirrored in the US, where President Trump spoke about imposing tariffs on Canada for “wilful negligence” and of “not properly maintaining” its forests after smoke from Canadian fires reached the US.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, chief executive of the Moorland Association Andrew Gilruth explained his organisation's position in more detail stating that “Reduced vegetation management [due to rewilding] can leave large, continuous expanses of dry vegetation without effective firebreaks.”
Instead Gilruth says “prescribed burning [a traditional moorland management practice known in Scotland as 'muirburn'] can create a mosaic of vegetation ages, including younger areas that can help slow the spread of wildfire.”
A host of ecologists, conservationists and nature organisations have challenged these claims. While Rewilding Britain and other bodies acknowledge that unmanaged growth could be a fire risk, they say that rewilding offers long term resilience against wildfires. Rewilding Britain's chief executive Rebecca Wrigley condemned the Mail's article: “Blaming rewilding for wildfires is nonsense. Rewilding is one of the most hopeful solutions we have to tackling extreme weather conditions. Our survival depends on a wilder Britain, which will provide us with wetter land, cooler space, cleaner water and air, and a more resilient, safer place to live.”
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A Defra spokesperson said in response to the Mail article: “Peatland restoration [a key part of upland rewilding] is the most effective, sustainable, and long-term solution for reducing fuel load on degraded peatlands, as wetter, healthy-functioning peatlands hold more water in the landscape for longer and are more resilient to the impacts of wildfire.”
Rebecca Wrigley lays much of the blame for the fires on traditional land management practices: “Drained moors, commercial timber plantations and artificially dry landscapes are the real tinderboxes across our countryside. Decades of damaging drainage have squeezed the land dry, and an obsession with an unnaturally tidy landscape has created hyper-flammable monocultures.”
While some nature reserves such as Dunwich Heath in Suffolk and Haut Fagnes in Belgium have been devastated by wildfires, there have also been serious fires in 'unwilded areas'. For instance, there have been numerous fires on farmland throughout Europe, especially among arable crops. In south-west France, the devastating conflagrations near Bordeaux that led to 250,000 people being evacuated, were centred on the conifer plantations of La Landes forest .
On 13 August, the same day as the Daily Mail article, 19 homes in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, UK were destroyed and another 19 seriously damaged by a grass fire near a gold course. Meanwhile, the Bannau Brycheiniog [Brecon Beacons] and the Welsh valleys have suffered from dozens of fires where there is little or no rewilding and where landscapes have been intensively managed for decades.
Gwent Wildlife Trust, which manages some land in South Wales affected by the fires, also challenges the notion that nature reserves encourage wildfires saying: “Studies suggest 85-90 percent of wildfires are caused by human activity... campfires, BBQs, cigarette butts and littering... Wildfires occur on nature reserves because they often have open access to the public.”
Statistics suggest that only a tiny fraction of the UK landscape is undergoing rewilding. While Defra does not offer a figure, Rewilding Britain estimates that less than 1% of Britain's land is actively being rewilded while about 6 per cent is managed for nature in some way. By comparison, 11% of the UK landcover is “mountain, moorland and heath”, according to the Office for National Statistics.
