Spain loses almost 3,000 firefighters in one year despite increase in number of more virulent fires
Public spending on fire prevention has increased by 60% in ten years, but it still remains below the European average
Spain had 2,700 fewer firefighters at the end of 2024 than at the end of 2023, despite fires becoming increasingly common and virulent in the country. Data published by European office Eurostat on Tuesday reveals that Spain had 39,400 professionals at the end of 2024, compared to the more than 42,100 personnel at the end of 2023. At the same time, the EU as a whole has been increasing the number of firefighters year after year, reaching a total of 390,600 at the end of 2024, 28,200 more than a year earlier.
Spain has far fewer firefighters than Italy, France or Germany. The latter has more than 25,000 more professionals than Spain. It is true that Eurostat does not provide an index of how many firefighters each country has in comparison with its forest area, but it does publish the proportion that this group represents in relation to the total number of people employed in the country.
In this respect, Spain has 1.8 firefighters per thousand employees, slightly below the European average (1.9). In contrast, Greece and Croatia are the countries with the highest proportion of firefighters, where four out of every thousand employees are firefighters. The lowest ratios are in Denmark (0.8) and the Netherlands (0.7) - the only two EU countries where there are fewer than one firefighter per thousand employees.
Public spending in EU countries has been progressively increasing over the last decades, forced by circumstances. In recent years, fires have devastated thousands of hectares in a large number of European countries, which has forced them to allocate an increasing part of their budgets to prevention. In Spain, this increase in spending is slower than in others. According to Eurostat data, Spain spent approximately 2.8 billion euros in 2023 (the latest figures available) on fire protection - a figure much lower than other European powers such as the 4.2 billion spent in Italy, the 7.4 billion in France or the 12.8 billion in Germany.
In total, public spending by EU countries increased to 34.9 billion in 2023, a 7% higher outlay than in 2022. Compared to total public spending, Spain spent 0.4% on fire prevention, below the European average (0.5%) and half that of other fire-stricken countries such as Greece, where 0.7% of all public spending goes towards fire prevention.
Spain is not all about negative data, however. It should be noted that the country has increased expenditure in this field by 60% in the last ten years, going from the 1.7 billion in 2013 to the current 2.7 billion.
Wage differences
Eurostat data shows that investment in prevention is not sufficient, despite its importance. On Tuesday, 26 August, trade union UGT secretary for administration Victoria Corbacho explained that, for every euro invested in prevention, 100 euros are saved in extinction. She insisted on the need to "carry out information and awareness campaigns for the population and include them in school curricula, because, when it comes to evacuation and emergency situations, people in Spain are not prepared".
In addition, Corbacho denounced that there are differences of 10,000 euros per year among the salaries of firefighting professionals depending on the regions in which they are based. She said that there are barely 6,000 officials (forest officers) for a country with 50 million hectares. The union has called for "active and continuous forestry management" in order to revitalise the rural environment, encourage agricultural activities and promote policies to adjust the population in rural areas.
