Europe battles fast-moving wildfires. Can deeptech come to the rescue?
Wildfires sweeping across France and Spain have exposed how quickly Europe’s firefighting capacity can be overwhelmed. By 25 July, approximately 197,000 people had been evacuated from the French departments of Gironde and Landes, while around 88,000 had been evacuated or confined to their homes in Spain, according to Reuters.
Transport routes have been disrupted and assistance mobilised from across the European Union. Sustained heat, dry vegetation and strong winds are creating conditions in which a small fire can become a regional emergency.
By 22 July, 254,388 hectares had burned across the EU since the start of 2026, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. It had recorded 1,254 fires—more than twice the long-term average of 569 for the same point in the year. The figures cover fires of approximately 30 hectares or more that include at least some forested land.
As European cities invest in infrastructure to cope with extreme heat, governments are also assembling a new technological layer around wildfire management. Thermal satellites, artificial intelligence, physics-based simulations and climate models promise to identify danger earlier and give emergency services a clearer picture of what is happening.
A national fire-detection system in orbit
On 3 May, 2026, four small c+CubeSat satellites developed by Munich-based startup OroraTech were launched from California as part of the Hellenic Fire System. The European Space Agency described it as a world first: a national satellite capability dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires.
Each CubeSat carries two infrared imagers operating across different wavelengths. The instruments are designed to detect active fires, identify unusual heat signatures and measure the intensity of thermal emissions.
The system returned its first thermal image in July following instrument calibration. Once fully operational, the constellation is expected to scan the whole of Greece twice a day. It forms part of a wider Greek Earth-observation programme funded through the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility and developed with technical support from ESA.
OroraTech’s wider wildfire platform combines information from more than 35 satellite and ground-based sources, according to the company. Its dedicated satellites are intended to fill gaps in existing coverage, including afternoon periods when fire activity frequently peaks.
The Hellenic Fire System has been reported as capable of detecting fires as small as approximately four metres across. Its AI analyses thermal data and filters out false alarms from other heat sources, such as industrial facilities or sun-heated structures.
Predicting where the fire will go next
Detection tells emergency services that a fire has started. It does not necessarily show which direction it will take, how quickly it could arrive or why one group of properties may be more exposed than another.
Cambridge startup Pinepeak is developing software to answer those questions. The British company was founded in 2023 by researchers associated with the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London. Co-founder and CEO Savvas Gkantonas began investigating wildfire behaviour after witnessing the destruction caused by the 2018 fire in Mati, Greece, where more than 100 people died. The researchers wanted to understand why some homes were destroyed while neighbouring properties remained standing.
Now in an early commercial stage of development, Pinepeak's FLAMESIGHT simulator combines machine learning and satellite data with physics-based modelling derived from combustion and fluid-dynamics research at the University of Cambridge. It uses “virtual particles” to simulate the movement of fire through convection, thermal radiation and airborne burning material known as firebrands. The particles respond to wind, terrain and different fuels, including trees, dry grass and flammable building materials. Pinepeak claims that through this approach, it can model thousands of possible fire paths within minutes and produce forecasts extending to individual properties, and forecast wildfire probability with accuracy of up to 90%.
Identifying where fire risk is increasing
Detection and fire-path modelling are most useful when authorities already understand where resources are likely to be needed.
Barcelona-based Mitiga Solutions works further upstream. Its EarthScan platform combines climate science, data modelling, machine learning and high-performance computing to assess the physical risks facing individual assets and locations.
The platform covers seven categories of climate risk, including wildfire, drought and heat stress. Users can examine exposure under different climate scenarios and time horizons, with resolutions of up to 90 metres for some hazards.
EarthScan is not designed to issue emergency fire alerts. Its customers, including infrastructure investors, manufacturers, property owners and insurers, use it to assess where assets should be located, which sites need protection and how climate risk could affect investment or operations. This underscores that Europe’s wildfire problem cannot be addressed solely during an emergency. Forest management, vegetation clearance, resilient electricity networks, evacuation routes and the positioning of firefighting resources all depend on decisions made months or years before an ignition.
From individual products to a working system
These technologies cover different parts of the wildfire cycle. Mitiga models where long-term danger is increasing. OroraTech detects active fires from space. Pinepeak calculates how a fire could travel and which communities or buildings may be threatened.
The opportunity surely lies in connecting those components and in ensuring that they can exchange information quickly enough during an emergency.
There could be a role in this for the EU, which has deployed assistance to both France and Spain under the EU civil protection mechanism this summer. The EU's Copernicus satellite service is also providing rapid emergency maps to support the response on the ground, and a liaison officer from the European Commission is in Bordeaux to help national authorities coordinate EU assistance.
Further reading on MoveTheNeedle.news:
Europe wasn't built for this heat. Cities are now building cooling infrastructure
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