Was Belgium prepared for the High Fens wildfire, as Interior Minister Quintin insists?

Federal Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Quintin told an urgently convened parliamentary committee on Thursday, 20 August, that Belgium was not unprepared for the major wildfire in the High Fens, while announcing a national action plan to strengthen the country’s response. Quintin said the emergency system had functioned as intended during the blaze, which began on 14 August, but conceded that the operation was not flawless and that Belgium needed greater resilience against increasingly severe vegetation fires.

Quintin sought to correct what he called the impression that the authorities had started from nothing. “No country has that much capacity available 24 hours a day,” he told the Chamber’s Interior Committee, arguing that exceptionally large emergencies inevitably require equipment and personnel to be pooled across services and borders. Firefighters, Civil Protection, police, military personnel, farmers and reinforcements from other Belgian regions and neighbouring countries were mobilised as the fire spread through difficult peat and heathland terrain.

The minister’s central claim was therefore narrower than a declaration that Belgium possessed all the equipment it needed: the established chain for escalating an emergency and requesting reinforcements worked. He said the federal authorities intervened when support was required but defended the decision to keep crisis management at provincial rather than federal level. Belgian emergency planning follows the principle of subsidiarity, under which a municipality or province remains in charge while it can still coordinate the response effectively.

That distinction matters in Belgium’s divided institutional landscape. Wallonia manages the High Fens reserve and is responsible for nature management and prevention within the territory. Local fire-rescue zones conduct firefighting, while the provincial governor coordinates a provincial emergency phase. The federal government can supply Civil Protection, federal police and other national resources, help obtain international assistance and declare a federal phase when nationwide coordination becomes necessary. Defence, which has its own command structure, can provide specialised personnel, vehicles and aircraft support when requested.

Quintin now wants a national wildfire-fighting action plan incorporated into the National Crisis Centre’s wider resilience programme. Reporting by Het Nieuwsblad said the plan would be submitted to the federal government, although no final budget, delivery timetable or binding division of responsibilities has yet been published. The proposal arrives during the second year of Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s federal coalition, meaning the government has time to legislate and fund changes before the scheduled 2029 federal election—but will also own the results.

The political dispute is not simply about whether procedures were followed. It is about whether those procedures were adequate for the event Belgium actually faced. Committee chair Ortwin Depoortere of Vlaams Belang challenged the overwhelmingly positive tone of Quintin’s account. Pierre-Yves Dermagne, the Socialist Party’s parliamentary leader, warned against producing another Belgian plan that might subsequently remain unused. Anders MP Arthur Orlians noted that Defence Minister Theo Francken was already developing a military fire plan and questioned whether the proliferation of initiatives would improve coordination.

The Workers’ Party of Belgium offered a sharper material critique. PTB-PVDA MP Natalie Eggermont attributed weaknesses in prevention and response capacity to earlier spending decisions and recalled Quintin’s 2025 position that the wildfire risk alone did not justify committing extensive budgetary resources. Groen, led by party president Aimen Horch, has separately called for more Civil Protection capacity, guaranteed aerial support and a permanent place for climate risks in national security planning. These arguments frame preparedness as advance investment, not merely the ability to summon assistance once a disaster is under way.

Federal Climate Minister Jean-Luc Crucke, Quintin’s Les Engagés coalition colleague, has also placed greater emphasis on anticipation. In an official statement, Crucke said climate risk could no longer be treated as marginal and called for the Climate Risk Assessment Centre, CERAC, to be integrated more systematically into national-security work. His office said the federal government allocated an additional €850,000 in March 2026 to FIRE4BE, a project building a national fire database, risk maps, detection tools and modelling capacity. A pilot fire-spread model was used during the High Fens operation.

The warning was not new. In May 2025, VRT NWS reported that Crucke had urged federal, regional and provincial authorities to prepare seriously for more frequent wildfires after CERAC concluded that existing capacity could become insufficient when several major fires occur simultaneously. The National Crisis Centre already classifies the probability of a large Belgian wildfire as high, although its reference scenario—50 to 500 hectares—was far smaller than reported estimates of the area affected in the High Fens.

That gap is the broader lesson from the parliamentary exchange. A response system can activate correctly and still be calibrated to a disaster smaller than the one it encounters. Quintin’s promised plan will be judged on whether it resolves operational questions exposed by the fire: dependable aerial support, specialised off-road equipment, rested crews, cross-border assistance and clear coordination between Wallonia, the province, federal services and Defence. The cause of the blaze, the definitive area damaged and the full cost remain under investigation. Until the formal evaluation and action plan are published, Belgium has a ministerial defence of the response—but not yet a complete public audit of its preparedness.