Fires in Marseille and Narbonne, threat of fires in several departments... Retailleau's "high-risk summer" has already begun

" There is every reason to believe that we are heading towards a high-risk summer ," explained Bruno Retailleau on Tuesday, July 8, from Marseille, where a fire ravaged 750 hectares and injured nearly 250 people. In the Aude department, more than 2,000 hectares of forest went up in smoke near Narbonne. A forest fire burned around 400 hectares in the communes of Castelnau-de-Guers and Montagnac, in the Hérault department. Another ravaged 500 hectares in the Cévennes early Tuesday afternoon, between Montdardier and Rogues, in the Pays Viganais (Gard), according to ICI Gard Lozère.

A fire also broke out Tuesday afternoon in the west of Toulon, in the Var department, mobilizing 64 firefighters, according to franceinfo. Another, which occurred Tuesday afternoon, July 8, in Haute-Corse, mobilized around fifty firefighters. While South Corsica, the Pyrénées-Orientales, and Hérault are no longer on orange alert for forest fires, Gard, Aude, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, and Vaucluse remain on alert. Bruno Retailleau 's "high-risk" summer has already begun, but the government still refuses to make the fight against global warming a national priority, while the Interior Minister has championed the fight against renewable energy.

June 2025 was the hottest ever recorded in Western Europe, as "extreme" temperatures hit the continent in two consecutive early heatwaves, the European Copernicus service announced on Wednesday, July 9.

As Europe warms twice as fast as the global average, "heatwaves are likely to be more frequent, more intense, and will affect more and more people in Europe," said Samantha Burgess, a climate scientist at Copernicus.

The consequences of global warming are numerous and dramatic: floods , heatwaves and... devastating fires. Approximately 3.8 million hectares have burned in Canada this season, and Europe has been facing forest fires for several weeks .

As the Paris Agreement celebrates its 10th anniversary , many scientists now say it will be nearly impossible to stay below the 1.5°C mark. "Globally, the climate is about 1.35 to 1.4°C warmer than the pre-industrial era," Samantha Burgess, whose observatory predicts that the 1.5°C mark of warming will be considered reached as early as 2029, told Agence France Presse in late June.