Did Belgium ignore warnings before the High Fens wildfire?

Belgian and European crews brought the main fronts of the High Fens wildfire broadly under control after the blaze, which began on 14 August near Belgium’s eastern border, burned roughly 3,000 hectares and forced residents around Waimes, Sourbrodt and Bütgenbach to leave their homes. Provincial authorities said on 20 August that the western sector was controlled while work continued in the east; surveillance and restrictions remained necessary because peat and dry vegetation can conceal hotspots.

For people living in Belgium, the fire turned a largely theoretical climate risk into an immediate test of emergency coordination. Firefighters from more than 15 Belgian rescue zones, including Brussels, worked alongside the Civil Protection service, Defence, federal police helicopters, local farmers and teams from neighbouring countries. BX1 reported that aircraft drawn from Europe’s civil-protection reserve also joined the operation. The deployment showed that cross-border solidarity works, but also exposed how quickly Belgium can require outside capacity when a fire exceeds the scale for which its services were designed.

The warning signs were unusually explicit. A February 2025 assessment prepared by the National Geographic Institute under the supervision of the Climate Risk Assessment Centre, CERAC, concluded that Belgian wildfires could become more frequent, intense and simultaneous over the following 15 to 20 years. It called for better fire records and detection, stronger support for responders and a federal coordinating body. A subsequent Belgian Wildfire Network white paper, developed by Ghent University, ULiège and operational stakeholders, argued for nationally compatible data, training, risk maps and warning systems rather than separate regional approaches.

That fragmentation is more than an institutional curiosity. Forest management belongs largely to the Regions, emergency work is organised through local rescue zones, governors can impose measures, and federal bodies provide crisis coordination, police aviation and Civil Protection support. The Belgian Wildfire Network says responsibilities, ownership and resources are spread across numerous agencies and ministries. Its concern is that Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels could develop incompatible systems, making public communication and operational cooperation harder during a fast-moving emergency.

Federal Climate Minister Jean-Luc Crucke says the government has begun responding. His office said Belgium allocated an additional €850,000 in March 2026 to FIRE4BE, a project intended to build a national database, improve detection and alerts, model fire spread and examine consequences for health and critical infrastructure. According to Crucke, a pilot propagation model was used during the High Fens response. He has promised to ask the National Crisis Centre for a detailed evaluation once the emergency phase ends, saying Belgium should “anticipate rather than endure”.

The political dispute concerns pace and accountability. Crucke argues that authorities should first protect residents, gather operational evidence and then decide what must change. Sofie Merckx of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, by contrast, has requested urgent meetings of the federal and Walloon parliamentary committees, specifically asking what followed the CERAC report. Her party says the scale of the fire justifies immediate scrutiny of prevention, equipment and crisis management rather than waiting for a later review.

There is also a more local counterpoint to the broad claim that Belgium is uniformly unprepared. Brussels Environment told Belga, through BX1, that it has mapped sensitive parts of the Sonian Forest, identified vehicle access and rendezvous points, maintains round-the-clock cover and has an intervention plan. It nevertheless acknowledged elevated drought risk and the need for supra-zonal reinforcements during prolonged fires. Preparedness therefore varies, while the missing layer is a coherent countrywide system.

The wider European lesson is that wildfire policy can no longer be treated principally as a Mediterranean concern. The European Commission has warned that areas of north-western, central and northern Europe previously considered less exposed are increasingly affected. The aircraft and foreign crews sent to the High Fens illustrate the EU Civil Protection Mechanism’s value, but shared reserves do not replace domestic prevention, trained personnel, reliable maps or compatible alerts.

Investigators have not publicly established the fire’s cause, and the final ecological damage is still being assessed. The next tests will be the National Crisis Centre review, parliamentary scrutiny, delivery of FIRE4BE’s tools and decisions on permanent aerial and specialist capacity. The central question is no longer whether Belgium can experience a major wildfire, but whether this fire converts two years of documented warnings into an integrated policy before the next prolonged dry spell.