Thirty Years of Forest Fire Management in Morocco: National Trajectory and a Comparative Analysis with French and Spanish Frameworks

Abstract

Since the 2001 Master Plan, Morocco has built, through successive stages, a forest fire prevention and firefighting system now recognized at the African and Arab level. This article traces, over three decades, the evolution of this system, encompassing governance, operational doctrine, aerial resources and surveillance technologies, then compares it with the recent transformations of the French and Spanish systems, which have faced an unprecedented intensification of fire risk since 2022 linked to climate change and, in Southern Europe, to agricultural land abandonment. The comparative analysis highlights three governance models (centralized and inter-ministerial in Morocco, a hybrid State-local government model in France, and a strongly decentralized model in Spain), a growing technological convergence, and a significant gap in the scale of burned areas, with France and Spain having shifted, in 2025-2026, into a megafire dynamic that Morocco has hopefully not yet experienced.