The Gironde fires, the worry, and what I do with my money

Romain Barbe

Founder · Mieux Donner · Reading time: 6 min

On some days that is harder to hold to, and today is one of them. A fire is advancing towards Bordeaux and tens of thousands of people have left their homes. My reasoning has not changed: those images make me anxious without making me useful. They give me a precise emotion and no lever at all. Here is what I look at instead, and what I do with it.

What I have learnt about frightening news

Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician and a professor of international health. He advised the World Health Organization and Unicef, co-founded the Swedish branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, and then set up the Gapminder Foundation, which he described as a fact tank rather than a think tank. His talks have been watched tens of millions of times. He died in 2017. His son Ola Rosling and his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund finished the book, which appeared in 2018. Its argument fits in a sentence: we are systematically wrong about the state of the world, and ten mental instincts explain why.

The first one that matters here is the negativity instinct. Rosling gives it three causes[1]. We remember the past badly. Journalists and campaigners report first on whatever is going wrong. And we feel that, as long as things are bad, it would be heartless to say they are improving. That third cause is the one that stays with me, because it explains why data about progress travels so slowly.

The second is the urgency instinct. Rosling writes that it stresses us and blocks analytical thinking[2]. It pushes us to decide too quickly and to take drastic steps we have not weighed. His advice comes down to three habits: take small steps, insist on the data, be wary of forecasts.

I recognised the mechanism in myself. I was a naval officer, and I would go several days, sometimes several weeks, without any internet access. I came back to a fortnight of newsletters and read them in one sitting. That is when the trick showed itself. Five kilometres gained on a front line. Snow stranding drivers on a main road. A megafire whose embers had long gone cold. Each item would have felt urgent had I read it on the day someone wrote it. A fortnight later it meant very little. Following events hour by hour taught me almost nothing. And it never once made me act. So I sorted my sources. I kept the ones that cover substance and describe things I can actually do.

What this fire owes to climate change

The facts first. As of 26 July, according to the Gironde prefecture, the fire that started at Saumos had burnt through 42,000 hectares, destroyed 240 homes and forced 220,000 people to leave theirs[3]. Seventy-five firefighters have been injured. Behind those numbers are families who do not know what is left of their house, tools of a trade gone up in smoke, nights spent in a sports hall. This causes a great deal of hardship and suffering. I am thinking of the firefighters, professional and volunteer, of the soldiers, and of the residents who have been mobilised since Wednesday and who are taking real risks to contain this fire.

Warming does not start a fire. It prepares the ground, and that is where the evidence is solid.

Météo-France has recorded a rise in meteorological fire danger since the 1990s, and puts it down to vegetation drying out[4]. World Weather Attribution studied the fires that destroyed more than a million hectares across Europe in 2025, two thirds of them in Spain and Portugal. Warming made the weather conditions that fed those fires about forty times more likely and roughly 30% more intense. Without it, an episode of that kind would occur less than once every five centuries[5].

So the climate does not explain everything, though it makes the risks and the consequences worse. By 2050, on the current trajectory, days of high fire risk in France would double and the area burnt would quadruple[7].

Three things that are true at the same time

Max Roser, who runs Our World in Data, sets three sentences side by side[8]. The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three are true together, and it is the third that gives us work to do.

The world is awful, and Gironde has just proved it fifteen kilometres from Bordeaux. It is far from an isolated case. Spain has lost nearly 130,000 hectares since 1 January, according to the European Forest Fire Information System[9]. Greece saw sixty fires break out in twenty-four hours in early July. Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Croatia and the Canadian Northwest Territories have had the same summer[10].

The world is much better. According to Our World in Data, which draws on the EM-DAT database held at the University of Louvain, the global death rate from disasters has fallen by more than 90% over a century[11]. The same researchers are precise about where that fall comes from: the hazards have not softened. Societies have protected themselves. Weather forecasting, public warnings, rehearsed evacuations, coordinated emergency services.

The world can be much better. In 2015 the Climate Action Tracker estimated that the policies then in place were taking the world towards roughly 3.6°C of warming by 2100. Ten years on, the same team puts that trajectory at about 2.6°C[12]. One degree gained in a decade, through rules and through the deployment of low-carbon technology. That progress concerns the trajectory rather than the level, since global emissions from fossil fuels have yet to peak. And if every net zero target announced by more than a hundred and forty countries were met, the estimate would drop to around 1.9°C. Work published in Earth System Dynamics in 2026 shows what that extra degree costs: a strong intensification of extreme fire weather across Europe at 3°C compared with 2°C[13]. Every tenth of a degree avoided means people who will never have to live through what tens of thousands in Gironde are living through this week. That is where giving does its work: on the number of people exposed to the fires that come next.

What I can do, and where I give when the fires come

There is little I can do about this particular fire, and the reason is reassuring. The emergency response in Gironde does not depend on private donations. On Sunday it involved 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 soldiers, 1,200 police officers and gendarmes and eighteen aircraft, all funded through taxation. My bank transfer would change neither the rate of water drops nor the number of engines on the forest tracks. So this is not where my money is missing. We have applied this reasoning before to humanitarian disasters.

What I can do is act on the emissions that make summers like this one possible. I have taken the 10% pledge, a decision to give at least a tenth of my income to effective charities. I have given thousands of euros to the Good Food Institute over the past few years under that pledge, because food accounts for roughly a quarter of global emissions and more than half of that comes from animal products[14], and because funding alternative proteins carries strong impact. I changed career to found Mieux Donner and to help other people put impact at the heart of their giving, and I now share concrete levers with those who want to make a difference.

This is what we call effective generosity: recognising that some actions carry a hundred times more impact than others, and looking for the ones that do the most, using data rather than intuition. On climate we rely on the assessments of Giving Green, which judges charities on their capacity to cut emissions and publishes all of its research. Its 2025-2026 list has five names on it[15].

Our page on climate change sets out the charities we highlight and the reasons behind those choices.

None of these charities will fight the fire burning right now. They work on how often and how fiercely the next ones burn, in ten years and in thirty. The leverage is very high, and this is where I know my money weighs most: every donation avoids a large volume of emissions, lowers the risk that these episodes repeat, and spares other people what families in Gironde are going through at the moment.

That work does not relieve states of theirs. They must keep cutting their emissions and engage more honestly with climate justice, towards the countries that bear the most from the disruption and have contributed the least to it.

I have never found a way to be useful by watching a news feed. I found one by deciding to set aside a share of my resources for other people, and by directing it where I can make the greatest difference.