Fires: 40 per cent on agricultural land – 37,000 hectares burnt in 2025

The epicentre of the wildfires in Italia is by far the South, where 95 per cent of the national area affected by wildfires is concentrated; the remainder is recorded in Central Italy, with almost none in the North, where only 0.3 per cent of the hectares burnt are located. The provinces most severely affected in 2025 were Agrigento, Caltanissetta and Trapani, which together account for 40 per cent of the national total. This comes as no surprise, given that in recent years Sicily has almost always accounted for more than half of the country’s burnt areas.

The economic impact

Wildfires also pose an economic problem, particularly for the agricultural sector. In fact, agricultural land accounts for almost 40 per cent of the areas burnt in Italia, with 37,000 hectares affected. To put this into perspective, this is an area equivalent to that occupied by two of the largest wine-growing regions in the north-east: the Prosecco DOC and Valpolicella regions.

However, as already mentioned, this phenomenon rarely affects the North (although the trend is on the rise – see the interview on the right), and even less so when it comes to agricultural land: those most affected are farmers in the South, where 98 per cent of the agricultural land burnt nationwide is located. This figure, however, may also include authorised fires carried out for land and field management purposes.

In the fires that affected agricultural land, almost a quarter of the area burnt (23.4 per cent) consisted of sclerophyllous vegetation, which includes Mediterranean scrub, evergreen shrubs and olive trees. In Sicily, this figure rises to as much as one in three hectares (32.7 per cent).

Just last week, in the province of Agrigento, a massive fire destroyed more than 50 olive trees and two vineyards. In mid-July, meanwhile, in the Pollino National Park in Calabria, one of the season’s largest fires burnt almost a thousand hectares of vegetation – mostly Mediterranean scrub – in the space of a week.

Indeed, the fires did not even spare protected areas and nature reserves: 28 per cent of the affected area fell within the Natura 2000 network, the European system of protected areas established to safeguard natural habitats and rare species. The area within the Natura 2000 network affected by the fires totalled 26,660 hectares.

The situation in 2025 is clearly dire, and it does not appear to be a phenomenon confined to the past: wildfires continue to plague the summer of 2026 as well, and with the arrival in recent days of the season’s fourth heatwave, the risk is growing ever higher.