This week, smoke is rising over the Gironde coast near Bordeaux, over the Var, and over southern Spain, where one of the country's deadliest wildfires in two decades has already claimed more than a dozen lives. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from Lège-Cap-Ferret alone. It follows a summer that has already seen fires tear through Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and France, well above the ten-year average, with the peak of the season still ahead of us.
It's tempting to read each of these events as an isolated emergency: a fire here, a heatwave there, a set of evacuations somewhere else on the map. But that framing misses the bigger story. What this summer is really testing is not any single region's firefighting capacity, it's Europe's capacity to coordinate across systems when several crises hit at once.
A plan is not the same as preparedness
In our work on the SAFARI project, which looks at how ports can become more resilient to extreme weather, we've spent the past phase doing something deceptively simple: mapping how decisions actually get made across port ecosystems, before, during and after disruption. Who decides what. Who talks to whom. Where the handoffs happen between port authorities, emergency services, terminal operators and logistics companies.
The pattern that keeps surfacing is this: most organizations aren't short on data, sensors, forecasts or emergency plans. The harder problem is connecting the dots between them. Different actors each hold a piece of the puzzle, but nobody automatically sees the whole picture. Interestingly, that gap tends to narrow during the acute phase of a crisis, when formal command structures take over and roles become clearer. It's in the recovery phase, when several organizations and jurisdictions are all still involved, but the emergency chain of command has stood down, that responsibility becomes blurry again.
That's not a technology gap. It's a governance gap. And it's exactly the kind of gap that shows up when wildfires knock out a road, a railway or a logistics hub, and the question becomes: who decides how goods get rerouted, and how quickly?
Ports aren't islands, but they are a useful stress test
Ports can genuinely help in these situations, offering alternative routes, temporary storage, or capacity redirected through coastal shipping or inland waterways. But a functioning port surrounded by blocked roads and downed power lines is like an operational train station with no working tracks outside it. Ports don't solve cross-system disruption on their own. What they do offer is a live laboratory for it: an environment where safety, continuity and economic loss all have to be managed at the same time, under real time pressure.
That's a useful lens for Belgium specifically. We don't need to experience a wildfire directly to be exposed to one. Disrupted transport corridors, delayed supply chains and pressure on shared European resources travel far beyond the fire line. The current wildfires are, in effect, a stress test we're all sitting in on: Where are we dependent on others? Who takes the lead when several systems fail together? Have we actually practiced the route, or only drawn the map?
Turning this crisis into next year's evidence
Nobody wants a crisis. But every crisis generates evidence for the next one but only if that evidence gets captured, shared and translated into practice rather than left in an after-action report nobody revisits. One of the clearer findings from our work is that lessons from past events are often identified but rarely documented systematically: what changed, why it changed, and under which conditions that change would still hold somewhere else.
That's the model we're trying to build through SAFARI's Port Expert Council: a space for practitioners across port ecosystems to pressure-test emerging guidance against real operational experience, and to learn from each other's near-misses rather than rediscovering the same gaps independently. Europe has built an extraordinarily connected single market. This summer is a reminder that our preparedness now needs to be just as connected.
