A wildfire does not need to kill a bird directly to destroy their life. Burn the place where they nest. Burn the plants and insects they depend on. Burn enough of the habitat they evolved to survive in, and the distinction becomes academic. That is what happened across Britain this summer.
Major wildfires in the Cairngorms, Suffolk and the New Forest destroyed large areas of important bird habitat, affecting some of Britain’s most threatened and specialised species. At the RSPB’s Abernethy reserve in Scotland, a fire in July destroyed habitat used by declining black grouse and capercaillie, as well as Scottish crossbills and crested tits.
Later that month, fire tore through Dunwich Heath in Suffolk, destroying much of its lowland heath. Woodlarks, Dartford warblers and nightjars breed there. The damage was so extensive that some may not return for years.
Then, in August, another major fire burned part of the New Forest, again hitting habitat used by woodlarks, Dartford warblers and nightjars.
3 separate fires. One story.
Britain Is Drying Out
Wildfire needs something to burn. Britain’s exceptionally hot and dry summer provided plenty.
Summer 2026 was provisionally the UK’s hottest on record. England reached 38.1°C at Kew Gardens on 13 August, while June had already been confirmed as the hottest since records began in 1884. The effects did not disappear when the temperature dropped.
By September, much of England and Wales had significant soil moisture deficits. In the driest areas of southern England, unusually high rainfall would have been needed just to replenish the missing water, and those deficits were expected to persist for six months.
We can see the same change in our food. The Royal Horticultural Society is now advising gardeners to reconsider cauliflower and other thirsty brassicas because increasingly hot, dry summers make them difficult to grow reliably. Broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts are also struggling, while warmer-weather crops such as okra, peppers, aubergines and melons are becoming more viable.
Britain is not simply having some unusually warm weather. The conditions under which plants, crops and wild animals live are changing.
What If We Have Been Counting the Problem Wrong?
Fossil fuels remain an urgent part of the climate crisis. But they are not the whole story. A 2025 paper in Environmental Research Letters argues that conventional greenhouse-gas accounting significantly changes how responsibility for global heating appears, particularly because land-use emissions are generally treated differently from fossil carbon. Using gross land-use emissions, incorporating past deforestation and comparing emissions through effective radiative forcing, the study attributed 60% of the change in effective radiative forcing since 1750 to agriculture. Its estimate of temperature change is even harder to ignore. The analysis attributed about 0.74°C of net global surface warming between 1750 and 2020 to agriculture, with 86% of that agricultural warming, around 0.64°C, attributed to animal agriculture.
This is not the conventional way climate responsibility is calculated. The author acknowledges substantial uncertainty, particularly around land carbon flows and aerosol cooling, and describes the results as indicative rather than exhaustive. But that is precisely why the paper is interesting. Change the accounting conventions and agriculture stops looking like a secondary climate issue. Under the study’s approach, it becomes the largest sectoral contributor to present-day warming.
And within agriculture, animal farming dominates.
The Birds Do Not Care Which Column We Put the Emissions In
There is something grotesquely detached about reducing all of this to sectors on a spreadsheet. A Dartford warbler does not know what effective radiative forcing is. A nightjar does not know whether the carbon released when forests were cleared centuries ago appears in this year’s emissions inventory. A capercaillie does not care whether methane is converted using GWP100 or another climate metric.
They experience the result.
A hotter summer.
Drier vegetation.
Fire.
A habitat that existed in June and does not exist in September.
The climate crisis is usually discussed as though its victims are somewhere in the future. These fires make that harder to maintain. Animals living in Britain now are already losing the places their lives depend on. And if animal agriculture is helping heat the planet while also occupying enormous areas of land, the answer cannot simply be finding slightly less damaging ways to continue using animals. The study notes that grazing alone occupies 37% of the world’s ice-free land and around 3 quarters of agricultural land. It also estimates that land currently used for animal agriculture has around 540 gigatonnes of CO₂ worth of carbon restoration potential. We are burning habitat in one place while dedicating extraordinary amounts of the planet somewhere else to breeding, feeding and killing animals.
Wildfires make the news. The system helping create the conditions for them is not discussed nearly enough.