France Vowed to Rebuild Its Forests Differently After 2022. Then 42,000 Hectares Burned Again

The forest west of Bordeaux is not really a forest. It is a plantation — and its structure is the reason the Saumos fire moved as fast as it did.

The Gironde holds more than 800,000 hectares of intensively managed maritime pine monoculture. Those high-density stands offered everything a fire needs: abundant needle litter, ladder fuels connecting ground to canopy, volatile oils supporting rapid combustion, and connected crowns that let flames travel through the treetops rather than along the floor. That combination, researchers at World Weather Attribution concluded, explains the speed of the spread.

France has now watched roughly the same landscape burn at roughly the same scale twice in four years — a frequency scientists now expect every six years rather than once a generation.

A Forest Planted as a Crop

The Landes forest is not ancient. It dates to an 1857 law on draining and cultivating the Landes de Gascogne, under which Napoleon III ordered municipalities to sow maritime pine and sell off heathland considered unproductive. Marshland became productive forest. The shepherds who had crossed the heath on stilts disappeared, and the displaced found work in timber and pine-resin harvesting.

Nearly 170 years later, the forest's primary purpose is unchanged: timber production.

€10 Billion, and Who Owns It

The timber sector is the third-largest industrial sector in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, supporting roughly 56,000 jobs — about 34,000 tied directly to the Landes de Gascogne — and generating an estimated €10 billion in annual revenue.

Ownership is where the story turns. More than 90% of the forest area in Les Landes is privately held, and 75% of that is concentrated among just 20% of landowners. The National Forestry Office and local municipalities manage the remainder. The Southwest Foresters' Association, which represents more than 65% of the region's private forest, puts sector employment nearer 60,000 and revenue above €10 billion.

That concentration determines who decides what gets replanted. It is not the state.

The Replanting Fight

After the 2022 fires, Gironde authorities launched a reforestation strategy encouraging oak, birch, chestnut and alder in selected areas. The reasoning was straightforward: single-species stands let flames spread faster, while mixed species break up fuel continuity and hold varied moisture levels.

Four years on, the fire returned at comparable scale — which has reopened the question of whether voluntary encouragement was ever going to be enough.

Macron convened an emergency cabinet meeting as the blaze closed on Bordeaux, and during a 27 July visit to the burn zone pledged to rebuild a different kind of forest.

The industry's position is more nuanced than that framing implies. Alliance Forêts Bois, the largest cooperative in the massif, produces diversification kits at its Arue nursery in the Landes — mixed plantings of cork oak, strawberry tree, umbrella pine, wild pear, hornbeam and wild cherry — and between 2024 and 2026 expects those kits to create more than 100 kilometres of forest edge on member properties. But at a section meeting in May, the cooperative told members the forest of tomorrow would still be built around maritime pine, a hardy species whose natural range runs from the Landes to Morocco.

Critics say edge plantings around a monoculture core miss the point. The environmental group Canopée has documented the cooperative clear-cutting mixed woodland to plant maritime pine in its place. The Southwest Foresters' Union has itself come out against clear-cutting broadleaf stands for replacement by conifers — a split inside the industry, not merely between industry and environmentalists.

Where the Money Argument Lands

The unresolved policy question is the gap between who profits and who pays.

Allianz Research found only around 10% of European economic losses from wildfires, heatwaves and droughts were insured between 1980 and 2022, against more than a third of storm and hail losses. Suppression, evacuation, emergency housing and recovery costs fall to the public. Timber yield accrues to private owners.

The losses also reach well past burned assets. More than 13,000 businesses were evacuated in Gironde, generating business-interruption claims with no physical damage at all — costs that will never appear in a forestry ledger.

What Replanting Season Decides

The practical deadline is the next planting cycle. Burned stands will be cleared and replanted within a few years, and whatever goes into the ground then determines how the next fire behaves. There is no mechanism currently compelling diversification on private land, and the economics still favour maritime pine, which grows fast, mills predictably and has a mature supply chain built around it.

Which means the question facing the Landes is not whether the forest recovers. It will. The question is whether it recovers into the same thing.