Europe on fire

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Story – "Europe on Fire"

Host: Manveen Rana
Guests: Katie Gatens (Europe Correspondent, The Sunday Times), Emma Yeomans (News Reporter, The Times)
Date: July 28, 2026
Episode Focus: The unprecedented wildfires sweeping across France, Spain, and the UK, their causes, impact, and what they signal about Europe's changing climate and preparedness.

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Overview

This episode of The Story delves into the devastating and record-breaking wildfires sweeping through Southern and Western Europe, with a focus on France and Spain, as well as the emerging crisis in the UK. Through on-the-ground reporting from Katie Gatens and data-driven analysis by Emma Yeomans, the discussion explores the scale of the disaster, personal accounts from evacuation zones, and the deeper context indicating that such events could become Europe’s new normal under climate change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Situation on the Ground: France and Spain

• Firsthand Accounts from Bordeaux

  • Katie Gatens recounts her entry into wildfire zones near Bordeaux:

    "You just see thick, thick white smoke... Every instinct tells you that this is the wrong way to be driving, but we wanted to report on the story. The smoke just fills the car. Every breath felt very difficult, and we were staying conscious of signs of CO2 poisoning."
    (Katie Gatens, 01:29)

  • The road infrastructure is in chaos, with evacuations leading to dangerous nighttime navigation through ash-covered roads:

    "Hot ashes on the tarmac that could melt the rubber of the wheels, which would render your car completely useless. You would be stranded essentially in the middle of a forest fire."
    (Katie Gatens, 02:09)

  • Visual descriptions evoke the sense of apocalypse:

    "Coming into land on the plane... all you can see is smoke. The sun is orange. It feels like the sun is on fire. It's just ghostly and glowing and burning, and it feels very unnatural to land a plane into those kind of conditions."
    (Katie Gatens, 05:20)

• Evacuations and Life for Displaced People

  • Over 220,000 people evacuated in Bordeaux alone, entire villages mobilized overnight.

  • Conference center evacuation sites are overcrowded and under-resourced:

    "At that point there were estimated to be about 5,000 people there. There were only beds for 800… it's honestly like a refugee center. I've never seen anything like it."
    (Katie Gatens, 07:45)

  • Efforts at systematic evacuation: digital alarms on phones, door-to-door checks for the elderly, and staged withdrawal towards larger cities.

• Frustration with Authorities

  • Public anger in France due to perceived lack of follow-through after previous fires:

    "President Macron at that time in 2022 promised more firebreaks, more resources, a better response… People are questioning...have these been false promises?"
    (Katie Gatens, 10:34)

  • Limited firefighting resources and dependency on volunteers under harsh and dangerous conditions.

    "The landscape is so dry… pine trees lined up like matchsticks… There's nothing to stop it. The towns are very much embedded in this forest landscape."
    (Katie Gatens, 11:28)

The Broader European Context: The New Normal?

• Climate Change Signs
  • 2026 marks France's worst wildfire season on record—and it’s only July.
  • Areas historically insulated from wildfire (like Scotland and Austrian Alps) are now becoming vulnerable:

    "This is the year when climate change has really hit, and I personally hope that leads to a bit of a wake-up call."
    (Katie Gatens, 12:51)

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Wildfires in the UK

• Scale and Nature of Recent UK Fires

  • Emma Yeomans details an alarming uptick in wildfires, previously rare in the UK:

    "Pretty much 300 in two weeks. And that didn't include the awful fire in the Cairngorms."
    (Emma Yeomans, 16:32)

  • Major incidents include:

    • Two major fires in Wales (one still burning in Snowdonia)
    • A significant fire in the Peak District, which blanketed Manchester in smoke
    • The Cairngorms fire in Scotland, prompting evacuations

• Data, Definitions, and Underreporting

  • UK wildfires sometimes undercounted due to strict size-based definitions.

  • Definition of wildfire: Generally more than one hectare in size, requires multiple fire crews, lasting six hours or more.
    (Emma Yeomans, 20:55)

  • Resource strain:

    "Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service... attended 128 outdoor fires in the first two weeks of July alone, of which seven required at least five fire engines. Over the past three years, the average over the same period was just 70."
    (Emma Yeomans, 20:55)

• Fire Risk & Conditions

  • Persistent high fire risk (Fire Severity Index at very high/exceptional in many regions).
  • The "30-30-30 Rule": Over 30°C, under 30% humidity, wind speeds above 30 km/h, making fires much harder to control.

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Challenges: Response, Resources, and Environment

• Firefighting Limitations

  • UK lacks substantial aerial firefighting resources:

    "Helicopter support had been approved... but all of our helicopters were occupied in England and Scotland already and they were waiting for those helicopters to become available while the fire burned."
    (Emma Yeomans, 24:00)

• Ecological & Climate Ramifications

  • Burning peat releases colossal amounts of carbon:

    "Peat boglands... hold 30% of all soil carbon... more than twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world combined… 90% of the carbon emissions from wildfires in the UK are released from the peat."
    (Emma Yeomans, 24:52)

  • Peat fires smoulder underground, making them especially difficult to extinguish and more damaging over the long term.

• Climate Change Discussion

  • Strong consensus from guests that the growing wildfire crisis is closely tied to human-driven climate change.

    "It's hard to argue that it isn't at this point… We can't escape the fact that is the result of man made climate change."
    (Emma Yeomans, 26:02)

  • UK and Europe must adapt to this new era of wildfires as a recurring feature of summers.

    "We have to be ready for this. I don't see how it gets rapidly better unless our climate suddenly becomes a lot wetter. We have to be prepared that we live in a country that is now wildfire, probably."
    (Emma Yeomans, 26:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Description | |-----------|---------|------------------| | 01:29 | Katie Gatens | "Every instinct tells you that this is the wrong way to be driving, but we wanted to report on the story." | | 05:20 | Katie Gatens | "The sun is orange. It feels like the sun is on fire. It's just ghostly and glowing and burning." | | 07:45 | Katie Gatens | "It's honestly like a refugee center. I've never seen anything like it." | | 12:51 | Katie Gatens | "This is the year when climate change has really hit, and I personally hope that leads to a bit of a wake-up call." | | 16:32 | Emma Yeomans | "Pretty much 300 fires in two weeks ... It’s a very scary picture." | | 24:52 | Emma Yeomans | "They [peat boglands] hold 30% of all soil carbon. ... more than twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world combined." | | 26:02 | Emma Yeomans | "It's hard to argue that it isn't at this point ... that is the result of man made climate change." | | 26:40 | Emma Yeomans | "We have to be prepared that we live in a country that is now wildfire, probably." |

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Timeline of Important Segments

• [00:59-03:37] Firsthand reporting from the Bordeaux wildfire zone; the scale of European evacuations
• [04:46-07:45] Descriptions of life in evacuation centers; the emotional and material impact on communities
• [10:34-11:28] Public anger and a critical look at governmental responses and preparedness
• [12:51-13:51] The wider European context and the sense of a historic turning point due to climate change
• [16:17-18:21] The UK wildfire crisis: data, unusual incidents, and emerging patterns
• [20:55-21:50] Definitions and resource implications for UK wildfire response
• [22:02-24:44] Firefighting challenges, peatland fires, and the climate feedback cycle
• [24:52-26:30] Impact on carbon emissions, and discussion of wildfires as a climate change indicator

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Conclusion

This episode paints a stark and vivid picture of Europe in the grip of fire—a landscape transformed by extreme weather and a society scrambling to adapt. The stories and statistics suggest wildfires are no longer exceptional events, but a recurring and escalating threat, intimately linked to the climate crisis. Both on the continent and in the UK, there’s an urgent call not just for immediate firefighting resources, but for a fundamental rethink of how European countries prepare for, manage, and prevent a burning future.

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For Listeners Who Haven't Tuned In:

This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in the human and environmental impact of climate change in real time, offering ground-level reporting, informed context, memorable imagery, and hard data on what might be Europe’s new summer reality.

Transcript

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[Manveen Rahner]

from the Times and the Sunday Times. This is the story. I'm Manveen Rahner.

[Katie Gatens]

On Saturday morning at about 2 in the morning, me and her photographer were driving towards Bordeaux. The roads were closed and people had evacuated hours and hours before.

[Manveen Rahner]

Katie Gatens is Europe correspondent for the Sunday Times, which a few days ago took her into the heart of the wildfires near Bordeaux.

[Katie Gatens]

All of a sudden in the distance, there's just thick, thick white smoke. And we're driving into it. Every instinct tells you that this is the wrong way to be driving, but we wanted to report on the story. So we drove into this smoke and it just fills the car. Every breathful felt very difficult and we were staying conscious of signs of CO2 poisoning. You know, we were just sort of trying to stay alert. And there is a lot of adrenaline running through you at that moment because things could change in seconds. No street lights, complete darkness. You know, we turned the full beam on the car and it was almost worse. It was just dazzling straight back at us because of the density of the smoke. It was so thick you don't know what you're driving on. And the things that we saw on the road that we had to be very careful of, as, you know, hot ashes on the tarmac that could melt the rubber of the wheels, which would render your car completely useless. You would be stranded essentially in the middle of a forest fire.

[Manveen Rahner]

More than 325,000 people have now had to flee the ferocious wildfires in France and Spain, and firefighters believe the next 48 hours will be decisive as they face a race against time to contain the flames before the next heat wave hits and helps them spread.

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C' est un fou.

[Emma Yeomans]

This is a fire that has a

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life of its own.

[Emma Yeomans]

It exploits both weather conditions and the nature of the forest to behave in

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a completely erratic manner. It is autonomous and self sustaining, spreading

[Emma Yeomans]

unpredictably in all directions.

[Manveen Rahner]

That was the Interior Minister of France after an emergency meeting held by President Macron. But while France and Spain struggle to contain the wildfires that are still raging here in Britain, another crisis is unfolding.

[Katie Gatens]

This is the worst fire we've had here in living memory and probably a

[Emma Yeomans]

lot longer than living memory.

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I myself have seen, you know, fires

[Emma Yeomans]

before, but this is something of a. It looks like an apocalyptic scale.

[Manveen Rahner]

The story today, a wildfires, the new normal. Katie, you're talking to us at the moment from Barcelona, but we know there have been a series of wildfires across France and Spain. You've been right in the heart of some of them. Just describe what the picture is like right now.

[Katie Gatens]

So, as the situation stands, it's probably going to be out of date by the time this podcast comes out, but there have been 220,000 people in the Bordeaux region evacuated because of these forest fires. Whole villages had got the alert at three in the morning, four in the morning, and they've had to take a prepared suitcase, hopefully, you know, a change of clothes, the most prized possessions, and evacuate.

[Manveen Rahner]

I mean, you were in Bordeaux. Just describe what it was like.

[Katie Gatens]

One of the most shocking things was coming into land on the plane on Friday. You can't see anything out of the window, but you start to smell the smoke gradually, and then all of a sudden you're in it and it's everywhere. And it feels terrifying because you're only a few hundred meters from the ground, but outside every window of the airplane, all you can see is smoke. And actually coming into land, the whole sky is just rippled and black, and you can just see a plume of black smoke coming from somewhere in the distance. It felt incredibly apocalyptic. There was still sunlight when I landed, and the sun is orange. It feels like the sun is on fire. It's just ghostly and glowing and burning, and it feels very unnatural to land a plane into those kind of conditions.

[Manveen Rahner]

You were finding your way into Bordeaux as a reporter to be able to report on the fires. Most people who live there were obviously trying to get out. How easy is that at the moment? What is transport like?

[Katie Gatens]

Well, at the moment, as it stands, the airport is still open, and I've been checking the arrivals and departures boards. There are flights taking off and landing, although who knows for how long. The government is now warning people not to travel to the region, which was not the case when I got there. The train station is full of people with suitcases. People just want to get as far away as possible.

[Manveen Rahner]

When you were there, I mean, where did you stay?

[Katie Gatens]

So we were Booked into a hotel, which actually ended up being closed. By the time I even landed, the town that the little bed and breakfast was in was already evacuated and closed. And as you can imagine, there's been hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Every single hotel room in Bordeaux city centre is fully booked. And so we actually had to sleep in the car, the rented car, which wasn't the most restful night's sleep I've ever had, but people have had a lot worse. Yeah, no, I can imagine.

[Manveen Rahner]

You did go around parts of Bordeaux visiting some of the evacuation centers where people who live there have been taken to. What was that like?

[Katie Gatens]

Yeah, so at about 6 in the morning on Saturday morning, we traveled to the conference center, which is just on the outskirts on the north of the city. And at that point there were estimated to be about 5,000 people there. There were only beds for 800. And it was a surreal experience. I mean, you can imagine a conference center. A lot of people have been to one, you know, like xl. Huge, huge, huge halt. And we walked through the car park. There was a man sitting with his boot open, sort of playing his guitar that he'd managed to grab as he had evacuated. Just passing the time. There were people who have camper vans who had just driven there with their family, and instead of going into the conference center, they were trying to sleep in the van to save the beds for people who really needed it. And you walk into the center itself and you know, it's people lying on the floor, people lying on cardboard, people lying on yoga mats. It's honestly like a refugee center. I've never seen anything like it. One side of the conference center is cordoned off and there are beds for elderly people from care homes. You know, people with tubes coming out of their nose and obviously with respiratory problems, people on crutches, zimmer frames. It's really eye opening and very desperate. You don't expect to see this in France, but this is just a new reality now.

[Manveen Rahner]

Just describe how they've gone about conducting this evacuation.

[Katie Gatens]

So as we were driving into the Wildfire zone, my phone started frantically buzzing, a really loud alarm saying, this is an evacuation zone, you must leave the area immediately. And that happened for everybody. There was also police and people from the town hall going from door to door, just making sure that everybody who was able to evacuate could evacuate, because there's a lot of elderly people who needed help. People were evacuated systematically from villages with close proximity to the fire and then gradually sort of edging towards the city of Bordeaux. At present, the City of Bordeaux has not been fully evacuated. That would be a major development. But temperatures are set to rise on Tuesday, which is tomorrow, to 37, 38 degrees, which will not help the situation.

[Manveen Rahner]

And, Katie, we're speaking on Monday. We know that President Macron is chairing an emergency meeting to try and work out a national response to these fires. Do people feel like enough is being done?

[Katie Gatens]

I've been looking on quite a few Facebook groups, and people in the rest of France, perhaps in the vicinity of the region who have not been evacuated, are very angry, actually, because there was a major fire here in 2022. This is not the first time a lot of these people had been evacuated. And apparently President Macron at that time in 2022 promised more firebreaks, more resources, a better response to this. So for the same thing to happen just four years later, people are questioning the. What has really been done, or have these been false promises? And really, how can we stop something of this magnitude happening again?

[Manveen Rahner]

It does sound like, you know, there probably wasn't enough capacity with things like the firefighters. I mean, I understand a lot of them are volunteers. Just describe how that's been playing out on the ground.

[Katie Gatens]

I think when you have a wildfire of this scale, it's very difficult for. For it to enter a controlled state, which is an official term for wildfires, if it's burning, but it's being controlled. You know, firefighters have a grasp on the spread of it. It has not been contained. And that's no disrespect to the efforts of the firefighters who are working day and night in awful conditions, you know, breathing in smoke and ash at type, incredibly high temperatures. It's just the landscape is so dry. And when you are there, you see these pine trees, honestly, lined up like matchsticks. You can see how quickly it can spread from one tree to another, from one field to another. There's nothing to stop it. And the towns are very much embedded in this forest landscape. Unfortunately, at this point, it's just waiting for the wind to die down, rain or a thunderstorm that will. That will help. You know, it's just a waiting game.

[Manveen Rahner]

Having been in Bordeaux and now being in Barcelona, is there a sense that these fires are changing France and Spain, changing Europe, really, for good? I mean, is this going to be the new normal?

[Katie Gatens]

This has been the worst wildfire season on record in France. You know, we're only at the end of July. You know, this is not the end of summer. It really feels like this is the year that when climate change has really hit and I personally hope that leads to a bit of a wake up call. I mean, we've seen with the Cairngorms fire in Scotland that this is starting to happen in the UK right now. And I think that we need to be looking at these places like the Austrian Alps, like Scotland, where forest fires or wildfires are completely unheard of and thinking how do we prepare? This is coming for us. So what measures are in place to make sure we we never end up in the same position as the people around Bordeaux?

[Manveen Rahner]

All eyes are on Europe, but wildfires are ripping across the UK at an alarming rate. We'll have more on that. Stay with.

[Katie Gatens]

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[Emma Yeomans]

I'm Emma Yeomans. I'm a news reporter at the Times.

[Manveen Rahner]

And Emmy, you've been looking at the picture across the country in terms of wildfires just paint a picture for us of what's been happening, give us a sense of where these fires are, how bad they've been.

[Emma Yeomans]

The fires across the UK are pretty bad. We're used to. Well, not used to, but we're seeing the pretty catastrophic images from France and Spain. And I think in that, we've slightly overlooked how bad things are on our own doorstep. Part of that is to do with how wildfires are recorded in the uk. We have a sort of technical definition that includes size, but let's say 10 meters short of the required wildfire size. Firefighters get something under control, it takes out a load of farmers, crops, it ruins a patch of hillside, actually, that very rarely gets reported. So what I've been doing is, for the first two weeks of July, I surveyed every fire service in England and Wales and asked how many fires they had had in the open, heathland, moorland, grassland, crops, and it was shocking. It was pretty much 300 in two weeks. And that didn't include the awful fire in the Cairngorms, because I only looked at England and Wales for this. So when you add in the fires in Scotland, that will be even more. But it also includes some really, really large 1, 2 now in Wales that have resulted in evacuations. One up in Conwy, which is out, and then the one in the southern part of Snowdonia, which is still burning, where they've been struggling to get helicopter support, struggling to get it under control. A really significant one in the Peak District, which started as two fires which are pretty much merged, that blanketed Manchester in smoke for days. Still burning because it's just peat smouldering. And then, of course, the one in the Cairngorms, which forced the evacuation of a village over the weekend. So it's a very scary picture. And these are some of our most beautiful and most precious habitats that are being lost very, very rapidly.

[Manveen Rahner]

It does feel like this is quite new. How unusual is this? I mean, in terms of the numbers, we're not used to seeing wildfires like this, surely.

[Emma Yeomans]

No, we're not. So far, compared to last year, this hasn't actually been the worst area on record for burned area. But what we're struggling with, according to firefighters, is a long, persistent period of high fire risk. So there's something called the Fire Severity Index. And what I've been doing is comparing the different data on this and you see when. When you look at the hectares of ground that's burnt this year compared to last, it's a bit Lower last year, looks worse in that way. But what we haven't seen last year and what is happening this year is Fire severity index being off the charts. You know, it's really shocking how high that is. And so that means that because the burned area measurements only pick up fires over 30 hectares, what we're actually seeing is just tons and tons of firefighter resources on endless small fires.

[Manveen Rahner]

And, Emma, tell us a bit more about that fire severity index.

[Emma Yeomans]

Yeah, this is recorded by the Met Office and Natural England as well, Natural Wales, and it measures the risk of a wildfire in different parts of the uk. It's regional from low through to exceptional. And if you pull it up right now, you know, anyone can have a look at this over the next week or so. Most of England is listed as very high and in a couple of days time later today, even actually, the risk of wildfires around London, Essex and Kent is raising to exceptional.

[Manveen Rahner]

And, Emma, whilst it hasn't, as you say, burnt as many hectares as it has in the past, yet, you know, we're not through with summer. Are there more incidents? Are our firefighters noticing? Getting more phone calls?

[Emma Yeomans]

It's really hard to get a clear picture of that because it really depends how big you go. And I think this is why fire services are really begging. People at this point don't have barbecues, don't have campfires, don't set off fireworks. Fireworks being the cause of one of these fires in the Peak District. And they are dealing with, as well as sustained significant fires, they're also dealing with call outs to things like a barbecue that's just got a little bit too big, or someone's left a campfire smouldering by the edge of a lake in the Lake District. But it's very hard to unpick because we don't always get a clear impact of their size at the time of the call.

[Manveen Rahner]

Well, that's a really good point. How do you define a wildfire? What distinguishes it from being a barbecue in a back garden that's just slightly out of control?

[Emma Yeomans]

There isn't a single set definition, but generally most fire services work to the National Fire Chiefs Council definition. And as a general rule, we say more than one hectare in size, so a very significant size. With that, you expect fires to require multiple crews, burn for six hours plus, but generally the hectare rule is a good one. It's very hard to measure because how small do you go? But to give you a good indication of how bad this year is Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service, which is one of the Fire services dealing with the devastating wildfire in the Peak District say they've attended 128 outdoor fires in in the first two weeks of July alone, of which seven of those fires required at least five fire engines. That's really big resources. Over the past three years, the average number of outdoor fires over the same period was just 70.

[Manveen Rahner]

Wow. So almost double at this stage. And that's only two weeks into July. What are the conditions that are making wildfires particularly bad at the moment?

[Emma Yeomans]

One of the things that fire services look for is the so called 30, 30, 30 rule. This is over 30 degrees of heat, under 30 degrees of humidity and with above 30 kilometers per hour of wind speeds. That's not about how common fires are to start. They can start in other conditions, but that is a useful metric, at which point fires become quite difficult to contain. They become very unpredictable, volatile, they can spread quickly. And earlier this month, Exeter University has a wildfire lab which studies wildfires across the uk. And they said it's one of the first times that the UK has been consistently meeting that threshold, as opposed to it being a sort of rare couple of hours here and there.

[Manveen Rahner]

And what exactly happens when one of these fires starts?

[Emma Yeomans]

So the worst of the fires we've seen have been on moorland and what we've got on the moors at the moment, because of the sustained dry weather over the last month and a half longer, really, is a very high fuel load. This is lots of dry brush, dry bracken, dry heather particularly, which burns like a, you know, extraordinarily quickly sitting on top of peat, which we all know, you know, people used to dig peat and use it to fuel their homes. It is flammable. And when that peat has dried out, it's very flammable and it will burn slowly and it will smoulder for a long time. So one of the challenges they're having with the larger fires, and I was speaking to firefighters in the peat district who were quite concerned about this, is that we've got fires that are smouldering down into the peat. And on the surface, it can look like all of the dry brush is burnt. The fire's out, you know, it's just scorched landscape. But underground, that peat is still burning and it can flare up very easily. It can also flare up in unexpected spots and that is proving very difficult for firefighters to get on top of.

[Manveen Rahner]

Wow. And has it been quite hard to control partly just because of resources? I mean, we're not used to seeing so many fires in so many places. From the people you've spoken to, how, how easy has it been to get help?

[Emma Yeomans]

We've got very, very good fire services at responding. But one thing that's been highlighted by farmers in Wales is difficulties getting aerial firefighting resources. This is the helicopter, the plane responses. I think many of us will have seen the amazing videos of aerial firefighting in France with Canadian planes sent out to help. Well, we don't really have that. We use private companies. And last about 10 days ago, there was a plea from some of the farmers on the edge of the major fire in Wales for helicopter support. They were saying it had been approved by National Resources Wales, but all of our helicopters were occupied in England and Scotland already and they were waiting for those helicopters to become available while the fire burned.

[Manveen Rahner]

There's also the question of carbon emissions. Just give us a sense of how bad these fires are for, for carbon.

[Emma Yeomans]

So it's a huge concern the amount of carbon these give off, particularly when peat burns. Peat boglands, peat as a moorland habitat. It's an amazing Superpower for the UK, climate wise. Right. They cover about 3% of the Earth's land area, UK and abroad. And by, according to the UN Environment, they hold 30% of all soil carbon. They store more than twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world combined.

[Manveen Rahner]

Wow.

[Emma Yeomans]

You know, they're this amazing carbon sink and when they burn, that gets released. The moorland management groups reckon that 90% of the carbon emissions from wildfires in the UK are released from the peat. So yes, when they burn, it's a huge issue for the UK and it really, it sets us back in our climate targets.

[Manveen Rahner]

That's extraordinary. So normally they're acting as a sponge, capturing and holding the carbon. Suddenly all of that is released and you've got less of the sponge left over later. All of which feels like it's got to be worse for climate change. That is one of the questions everyone is asking, is this a sign of climate change happening?

[Emma Yeomans]

I think it's hard to argue that it isn't at this point. These sustained, hot, dry summers create a landscape and environment that is incredibly vulnerable and will burn very, very easily. One of the chiefs at Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service described the whole of the Peak District right now as a tinderbox. It's just ready to go up. And that I do think is we can't escape the fact that is the result of man made climate change.

[Manveen Rahner]

And will that mean that, you know, the fires we're seeing across Europe, in France and Spain, the fires in this country. Is this certainly for the foreseeable. Is this the new normal?

[Emma Yeomans]

We have to adapt to it. We have to be ready for this. I don't see how it gets rapidly better unless our climate suddenly becomes a lot wetter. We don't have the rainfall this year. Exactly how climate change affects that I wouldn't want to predict. But I think we have to be prepared that we live in a country that is now wildfire, probably.

[Manveen Rahner]

That was Emma Yeomans, news reporter for the Sunday Times. And before that you heard from Katie Gatens, Europe correspondent for the Sunday Times. The producers today were Emily Webb and Jennifer Kennedy. The executive producer was Edward Drummond, sound design was by Dave Creasy and theme composition was by Malicetto. If you'd like to get in touch with us about this or any other story, or if you have any questions for our monthly Q and A podcast, do drop us a line to thestoryatthetimes.com and if you can do, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

[Katie Gatens]

Foreign.

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