A wildfire needs a name long before anyone knows what caused it. When the pines of the Gironde in southwestern France caught light in July, the fire was being reported within hours under the name of the ground it was burning. By the time it had taken 40,000 hectares, that name was fixed in every bulletin in Europe.

The investigation into how it started took longer, and the scientists working out why it ran so far took longer still, publishing into a news cycle that had already moved on.

Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks.

The name comes first, into an almost complete absence of information, and the word we reach for while we wait is “wildfire”.

It is a strange choice for Europe, where the human share of ignitions is put at roughly 97%. In the whole run of British fire service records, lightning has been logged as the cause of three wildfires, two of which turned out to be the same fire. This is why a 2024 parliamentary briefing stated flatly that almost all UK wildfires are started by people.

The defence is that “wild” never meant natural: a review of wildfire terminology across the........

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