Vast swathes of blackened pine forest in south-west France are to be replanted and homes and businesses rebuilt “according to different rules” dictated by the climate crisis, Emmanuel Macron has said, as he called for a European fleet of planes to fight wildfires.
A week of 40C-plus heat – part of a global trend of rising temperatures that is attributed by scientists largely to human activity – has caused misery from Portugal to the UK, smashing records and fuelling fires that have ravaged tens of thousands of hectares of land.
In France and Spain six times as much forest and heathland has been ravaged by fire this year, and in Portugal three times as much, as the average over the past 15 years, figures show. In Hungary the area burned, though much smaller, is almost 50 times greater than usual.
The French president hailed as heroes some of the nearly 2,000 firefighters who battled two huge blazes in south-west France that since last week have destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of forest, forcing the evacuation of 37,000 people from their homes.
Visiting the Gironde département, Macron praised the “tremendous chain of human solidarity assembled to beat the beast that is these wildfires” and he promised a “major national project” of reconstruction.
“Now we are going to stabilise the fire, go after the victory and rebuild,” Macron told residents and local business owners, including many campsite, hotel and restaurant owners who depend on the summer tourist trade for much of their income.
Mediterranean countries were “experiencing the full consequences of climate change”, he said, warning that all “will have to work to adapt our concepts of civil security” with “more protective rules, a long-term prevention plan”.
He said France’s 22-strong fleet of firefighting planes was one of the most modern in Europe, but the country would clearly need more and they should be part of a European fleet that could be deployed across the 27-member bloc.
Lower temperatures and a 300-metre-wide firebreak had helped to contain – but not yet extinguish – the Gironde fires, officials said. “Our assessment is generally positive. The situation improved overnight,” a fire service spokesperson said. Two firefighters were severely injured overnight.
France’s agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau, said the government had already earmarked €850m to upgrade its fleet of firefighting planes, as well as €1bn for replanting trees, but recognised it would have to do more.
“We are having to confront a quite exceptional situation, we are talking about more than 20,000 hectares affected in Gironde, 1,500 in Finistère and 1,500 in the Bouches-du-Rhône,” Fesneau said, referring to damage caused in Brittany and the south. Wildfires continued to rage on Wednesday in Brittany.
A man who was being questioned on suspicion of deliberately starting one of the fires in the Gironde département was released early on Wednesday morning, authorities said, after police ruled him out as a possible arson suspect.
More than 60 French communes registered their highest ever temperatures on Tuesday, including northern ports such as Dieppe, where the mercury hit 40.4C, and Boulogne, which registered 39.6C, two degrees higher than its previous record.
Elsewhere, Greek firefighters largely gained the upper hand in their battle against a wildfire raging for a second day in mountainside suburbs north of Athens that had forced hundreds of people to flee.
“For the most part the fire is in decline,” a fire service spokesperson said. Nearly 500 firefighters, 120 vehicles, nine planes and 10 helicopters were combating the fire in the suburbs of Penteli, Pallini, Anthousa and Gerakas, home to about 90,000 people.
Another fire broke out in Megara, west of Athens, on Wednesday morning, and the Greek government asked European countries to send firefighters. A squad from Romania helped tackle Tuesday’s mountainside fire.
Armando Silva, the civil protection chief in Portugal’s northern region, said rising temperatures and strong winds would make it harder to fight a huge wildfire that had burned 10,000-12,000 hectares since Sunday around the municipality of Murca.
In Spain, where fire crews were tackling fires in five different regions, the national weather service forecast higher temperatures for the end of the week, while in Italy wildfires continued to burn in several areas, including one that threatened to leave part of the north-eastern city of Trieste without power and water.
Firefighters near the town of Lucca in the central region of Tuscany battled a wildfire for a third successive day that had destroyed about 560 hectares (2.15 sq miles) of forest, authorities said, and forced the evacuation of about 500 people.
“Some fronts have strengthened because of the wind,” said the region’s governor, Eugenio Giani. In north-eastern Friuli Venezia Giulia, people were urged to stay indoors because of heavy smoke from the Carso area bordering Croatia and Slovenia.
Fourteen Italian cities including Rome, Milan and Florence are due to be put on the country’s highest heatwave alert on Thursday, up from nine on Wednesday, with temperatures expected to hit 40C across the north and centre of the country.
Britain topped 40C for the first time on Tuesday, shattering its previous record by 1.6 degrees. London firefighters endured their busiest day since the second world war, and on Wednesday engineers raced to fix buckled train tracks.
• This article was amended on 21 July 2022 to clarify a reference to the role of human activity in rising temperatures.
