I spent the weekend fleeing wildfires in France. This is what it felt like to be evacuated from my home

On Saturday morning last week, I was evacuated from my home in the Bordeaux metropole, in the south-west of France. The sky was black, the air was thick with ash, and all around me, people were getting into their cars, gathering their belongings. They fled the suburbs and the coast, carrying what little they could, their faces set with the particular fear of not knowing whether there would be a home to return to.

I am a daughter of this region. As a child of war refugees, not fully French, not fully Algerian, but entirely rooted in this soil, I learned my identity here, among the pines of the Landes and the long yellow beaches of the Gironde. On school trips with my public school, I learned to name the trees, to read the ecosystem, to love it. Our regional identities, which struggle to survive in France today, are inseparable from these hectares of forest, these lakes, this water. They run in our veins and bind us to our land more surely than any flag or passport. The toughness of our elders, and their generosity, was forged among the vineyards of our beautiful south-west, the same land where our terroir (our sense of place), our myths and our legends were born, and where our streams are now dying.

So how can I not feel rage?

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As I write this, more than 220,000 people have been evacuated in the Gironde region alone, and regional authorities say at least 240 homes have been destroyed. Many of our brothers, uncles and fathers have joined the ranks of the firefighters and the farmers facing flames that devour our land and our memories along with it.

And this is not one bad summer. According to WHO Europe, wildfires destroyed 2.2 million hectares across the region in 2025 alone, up from 1.4 million hectares in 2022, a trajectory that tracks rising global temperatures with grim precision. Now hold that against another number: as my community breathes smoke and watches its forests burn, TotalEnergies has just announced $11.2 billion in profit over six months. That is a 72% jump in net income, lifted by higher oil prices during the war in Iran. For the second quarter of 2026 alone, the company reported adjusted net income of $6.03 billion, up 68% on the same period last year, driven largely by stronger refining margins.

Read those figures again, and then look at a family standing in the ash of their house.

My people, and communities all around the world, are paying the price of our governments’ inaction. We are losing our homes, our memories, our communities. Our lives and our future are turning to ash. And here is the cruelty inside the catastrophe: our region is left to shoulder the enormous cost of fighting these fires and helping people rebuild, while governments continue to subsidise the very fossil fuel companies driving the crisis.

None of this was inevitable. These fires were made more likely, more frequent, more ferocious by global warming caused largely by burning fossil fuels. How many homes could have been saved, how many lives spared, if our governments had chosen to confront the climate crisis at the speed and the scale the science demands, instead of shrinking climate budgets year after year while the profits of the fossil fuel giants swell?

This is a fast-moving situation, and I don’t know what the next weeks or even the next hours are going to look like. The figures above will keep changing as the fires burn and as full damage assessments are completed. But the direction is not in doubt, and neither is the responsibility. On July 23, the day before I was evacuated, TotalEnergies announced billions in profits. On Tuesday (4 August), BP reported that its quarterly profits more than doubled to £4.27bn.

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Several US states have passed ‘Climate Superfund’ laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

It is high time that governments make fossil fuel companies pay for the damage they profit from causing. That means a permanent, higher tax on fossil fuels, and a climate damages tax on oil and gas profits, with the money directed to emergency response, to recovery, and to the long-term resilience of the communities on the front line of this crisis.

Mark my words: the companies that spent more than 50 years financing climate delay should not, and will not, continue to be allowed to send us the bill for the fires they helped set. I think of the elders who taught me these forests. I think of the children on their own school trips, learning the names of the same trees, trees that may not be standing when they are my age. The choice in front of us is not abstract, and it is not distant. It is written in the black sky over Bordeaux this week.

Our land is not a sacrifice zone. Make the polluters pay.

Soraya Fettih is global campaigns coordinator at 350.org.

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