The European Forest Fires Information System (EFFIS) reports on the fires in forest areas in Europe. According EFFIS, the current situation poses a high or even extreme fire risk in many parts of southern Europe and will continue in critical condition over the next few days.

At the moment the major fires (with a size of one to several thousand hectares) are affecting Spain (the most affected areas are Aragon, Almeria, Tarragona and Cuenca), France (Marseilles and the south of Corsica), Italy (especially Sardinia) and Greece (Euboea and Thebes). Although some of the major fires are kept under control, many remain active. There have been victims in Spain and Italy. Details of the each focus can be consulted on EFFIS' web.

EFFIS is established by the Joint Research Center (JRC) and DG Environment (DG ENV) of the European Commission. Its role, in addition to monitoring, is supporting the services of wildland fire management in the Member States, the Monitoring and Information Center (MIC) of the European Commission, based in Brussels, and other organizations in this field.

ITC has recently submitted an application of EFFIS to inform the MIC about the situation of serious fires across Europe. To do this, it uses local information about the damaged areas, as what populations are at risk, what are the nearest towns or cities and  which roads and hospitals are available. Through this application you can also compare simultaneous fires in Europe and support the MIC to send aircraft reserve for fire fighting.

It is not the first initiative in the field of fire: in 2008 the European Commission published a call for proposals under the Civil Protection Financing Instrument in order to strengthen cooperation between Member States in combating forest fires