At the ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11, eight German aerospace and defence companies signed a strategic positioning paper committing to build a sixth-generation fighter jet without France, under the banner “Team Gen 6”. Airbus called it “an existing step for European sovereignty”. Spanish industry is already lining up behind the initiative.

Three days earlier, France and Germany had officially abandoned the joint fighter jet program at the heart of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100-billion initiative that was supposed to embody that very sovereignty. Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called the outcome a policy failure for Europe: “Industrial interests have been prioritised over Europe’s security and defence interests.”

The question raised by the collapse of the program is the following one: can better management of coopetition by European institutions prevent sovereignty-driven projects from collapsing?

The FCAS collapse is a call to better understand the success factors of a strategic concept that sits at the heart of Europe’s strategic autonomy: “coopetition”, the idea that European competitors can and must cooperate to build sovereign capabilities that none of them can build alone. FCAS was not facing difficulties because the idea was fundamentally flawed. Rather, it struggled because coopetition, when it involves competing firms, competing states, and contested interests over critical technologies, is structurally prone to collapse without the governance architecture needed to sustain it.

When Aerospace competitors become necessary partners

The logic is straightforward, even if the practice is not. National champions, the historical model for European industrial sovereignty, are increasingly unable to sustain alone the scale of investment that frontier technologies demand. No single firm, and no single state, can credibly mobilise sufficient skills and resources to produce and operate a next-generation combat aircraft, a a competitive semiconductor ecosystem, or European AI infrastructure.

The response, across defence, space, energy, and critical technologies, has been to combine forces, including with direct competitors. This is what researchers call coopetition: strategies that are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. Partners pool costs and share knowledge to create value together, while each tries to capture as much of that value as possible individually.

The European satellite navigation system Galileo is an early instructive case. Launched in 2001 with a budget of €13 billion, it brought together firms, including Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, and OHB, that compete in the same markets. Pooling their R&D capacities allowed Europe to build a system capable of rivalling GPS. No single actor could have done it alone. The coopetition, carefully orchestrated by the European Space Agency as a neutral third party, worked (Rouyre and Fernandez, 2023).

FCAS has proved far harder to manage. The contrast is worth dwelling on.

The sovereignty twist

Coopetition always generates tensions (Tidström, 2014). Companies that cooperate to create value also compete to appropriate it. This produces a structural paradox: each partner must share knowledge to advance the joint project, while simultaneously protecting the knowledge it does not want to transfer. The line between the two is rarely obvious, and incentives to cross it are constant.

When the stakes are commercial, managing this is hard. When national sovereignty is involved, it becomes acute.

In the FCAS case, Dassault and Airbus Defence and Space are not merely industrial competitors, they are the industrial embodiments of French and German defence interests respectively.

Dassault’s Rafale and Airbus’ Eurofighter compete directly on the global arms market. Their collaboration in FCAS thus runs directly against their competitive interests, and neither partner can afford to be the one that transfers more than it receives.

This is not irrationality. It reflects what research literature calls asymmetric learning: the risk that, in any cooperative arrangement, one partner learns more from the other than it contributes in return. In standard industrial coopetition, this is a governance problem. In coopetition involving rivals from different states, however, it takes on a harder edge: strengthening your partner’s knowledge base may, in certain scenarios, amount to strengthening the capabilities of your competitor’s country.

The Galileo project itself offers a cautionary tale here. In 2003, China joined the program, investing €230 million and taking a substantial share of the work. “China will help Galileo to become the major world infrastructure for the growing market for location services”, commented Loyola de Palacio, the late Spanish former energy and transport commissioner.

Over time, Chinese actors absorbed enough of the technology to develop BeiDou, their own independent gps-equivalent positioning system, which they have since used to interfere with Galileo signals. The coopetitive project had, inadvertently, helped subsidise a rival. The lesson is not that cooperation is naive; it is that knowledge flows must be governed.

Spain, or the third partner’s dilemma

Spain joined FCAS in 2019 as its third partner. For Madrid, the program was never only about an aircraft: it was a vehicle for upgrading an entire defence-industrial ecosystem. When the Franco-German relationship turned into a learning race and then hit deadlock, Spain faced the classic dilemma of the junior coopetition partner: stay loyal to a stalling project, or hedge.

It hedged. Before the divorce was final, Madrid had approved funding for a joint Airbus–Indra study on a future national combat air system. Within three days of the official cancellation, Spanish industry had aligned itself with the German-led Team Gen 6, while Robles publicly lamented that industrial interests had trumped European security.

Belgium, an observer to the program, had reached the same conclusion months earlier: its defence minister declared the project “dead” as early as February.

Spain’s behaviour is not opportunism. It is the rational response to a coopetitive project without credible governance: when partners cannot trust the rules of the game, each discounts the project’s future and invests in alternatives. The trouble is that hedging accelerates the very fragmentation it is meant to insure against.

Governance determines if coopetition lives or dies

Neither of the Galileo or FCAS cases argues against coopetition. Rather, they argue for coopetition management to be taken seriously.

Why was Galileo successful, and why are we struggling to bring the FCAS program to completion? What FCAS has lacked is credible governance architecture: mechanisms that allow partners to cooperate intensively while limiting undesired knowledge transfers, distributing costs and gains in ways that each partner considers fair, and resolving disputes before they become public threats to quit.

Research on coopetition identifies several such mechanisms: structural separation between collaborative and competitive activities, formal protocols governing what is shared and what is ring-fenced and, perhaps most importantly, a neutral orchestrator capable of holding the process together when bilateral tensions escalate. The European Space Agency (ESA) played this role in Galileo. In FCAS, the three partner states have struggled to find an equivalent partly because the governance question is also a sovereignty question: who leads, and on whose terms?

The same dynamic is at work, though less visibly, across Europe’s other strategic technology bets.

Semiconductor supply chains require collaboration across firms that compete fiercely in end markets. AI infrastructure demands data-sharing between actors with strong incentives to hoard. Quantum computing development in Europe involves national research ecosystems that are as jealous of their advances as they are dependent on each other. In each case, coopetition is necessary; in each case, European governance needed to sustain it remains underdeveloped.

The uncomfortable conclusion

In sum, in the space industry the European states accepted the coordination role of the ESA. This coordination by ESA explains the success of the Galileo project. (Rouyre and Fernandez, 2023). In the defence industry, the European Defense Agency (EDA) does not play this role mainly because the European states do not want to delegate their defence capabilities to an European entity. The other European institutions such as the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR), European Defence Fund (EDF) do not play this role neither. Coopetitive projects are launched by European companies pushed by their governments without a strong coordinating mechanism at European level.

This is a pity for European sovereignty!

Once again, ESA’s strong coordination explains the success of Galileo and the lack of European coordination explains the failure of the FCAS program.

The will of each European state to shape its own defence industry creates tensions. However, no one national state in Europe can support alone the costs and the risks of highly innovative products required by the present and future battlefields and no-one has the innovation capabilities and the market scale to go alone.

Furthermore, the aerospace and the defence industries are becoming increasingly intertwined. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the defence capabilities are increasingly based on connection with satellites.

This change in warfare does seem to be taken into account by European states. Paradoxically, the success of European cooperation in the aerospace industry finally provides the tools for assuming European defence by European states. These states build their defence capabilities in space on ESA success whereas they refuse to delegate their traditional defence capabilities to EDA.

The rules of war have changed but the mindset of European leadership seems not to be able to change fast enough to follow! It is now evident that cooperation between competitors requires institutional infrastructure that Europe is yet to build, mechanisms to govern knowledge sharing, equitable distribution of gains, and the ability to absorb the tensions that are inherent to any relationship that is simultaneously collaborative and adversarial.

The risk is not that Europe will refuse to cooperate. Europe will keep launching coopetitive projects while lacking the governance capacity to see them through.

The FCAS totally collapsed and it is not simply a program failure. It signals that European industrial sovereignty remains, for now, more ambition than architecture.

Learning to manage coopetition at scale, across firms, across states, across sectors, may be one of the defining organisational challenges of European strategic autonomy. It deserves more attention than it currently receives.

This article draws on the chapter “Coopétition et souveraineté”, by Chloé Zanardi and Frédéric Le Roy, in Fragmentation, hypermondialisation, souveraineté. Pour une refondation de la stratégie d’entreprise, edited by Stéphanie Dameron, Boris Bernabé and Xavier Desmaison, (Éditions EMS, 2025).

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Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

Fire-smart risk assessment is needed to tackle the scale of wildfire destruction, which is a growing reality across the globe. Hazardous fires are more intense and more frequent, fuelled both by climate change and by the no less significant human footprint on landscapes.

Wildfire data outlines a clear trend: we are facing increasingly devastating events that trigger disasters of previously unknown proportions. According to the European Environmental Agency 3,770 km² of land is burnt yearly on average, with 45,000 people displaced due to wildfires from 2008 to 2023, leading up to annual losses estimated at €2.5 billion in the European Union.

In the summer of 2025, Europe experienced its most extreme wildfires in the past two decades in terms of area burned. Intense fires in the Iberian Peninsula scorched 6,720 km² of land, with 3,930 km² in Spain alone, resulting in a tragic toll of eight fatalities.

At the other end of the globe, Chile has also seen staggering figures, leading to particularly painful disasters. In February 2024, the Valparaíso–Viña del Mar fire claimed 136 lives and destroyed nearly 7,000 homes. Similarly, this past January in Concepción–Penco, another blaze killed 21 people and levelled more than 2,000 residences.

Examining pyrogeography

Understanding the potential of these fires to devastate communities and ecosystems is vital. Consequently, recent pyrogeographical research focuses on analysing fire behaviour across diverse spatial and temporal scales. In this context, two technological approaches stand out as the most effective for evaluating fire impacts: remote sensing resources like satellite imagery, thermal sensors, and airborne platforms, which are essential for reconstructing past impacts, as well as for early detection and real-time monitoring of active fires; simulation and predictive tools allow us to identify landscape configurations that facilitate the ignition and spread of fire and comprehend the complexity of forest fires.

By applying these insights to land-use planning, we aim to confront a reality that day by day increases the wildfire risk within our communities.

Remote sensing for mapping the scars of past wildfires

To quantify the magnitude of these events, we harness satellite imagery and advanced analytical tools to assess two primary variables: intensity and severity.

Intensity measures the fire’s power, i.e. the rate at which energy is released during combustion and helps pinpoint thermal hotspots.

Severity, by contrast, gauges the aftermath: the physical damage left in the fire’s wake.

By analysing specific spectral ranges, we can quantify the drastic drop in vegetation productivity, effectively measuring the ecosystem’s struggle to recover.

The recent Barroca Grande fire (Portugal, August 2025) and the Trinitarias fire (Chile, January 2026) serve here as case studies. By combining NASA’s FIRMS thermal data with European Space Agency(ESA)‘s Copernicus Sentinel-3 imagery, we can visualise the fire crisis in both space and time. These images reveal a staggering reality: smoke plumes stretching for hundreds of kilometres across the atmosphere.

The intensity data reveals that over 95% of the total eventual footprint was burnt in a single day in Chile on January 18. This is the definition of 'explosive fire behaviour’ – events so rapid they outpace traditional suppression efforts.

Beyond the immediate heat, our severity analysis provides metrics that are essential for recovery efforts. 57,782 hectares were scorched in Portugal.

By cross-referencing these damage levels with fuel types, local weather, and topography, we can design precise ecological restoration plans and help the agricultural sector rebuild in a way that is hopefully more resilient to future fires.

Fire behaviour modelling and risk assessment

In the world of fire risk assessment and management, there are two prevalent strategies.

The most common uses short-term assessments: the daily fire risk indices we see on the news combine current weather danger with local vulnerability. This is the backbone, for instance, of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

At the other end of the spectrum lies a more “strategic” tool called quantitative simulation. Rather than looking at what might happen tomorrow (or is currently happening), this approach uses advanced modelling techniques to guide long-term planning and risk mitigation.

To anticipate possible effects of warmer and drier fire seasons or landscape transformation (e.g., land abandonment), we assess wildfire exposure using a blend of empirical modelling (learning from the history of how fires have actually occurred and behaved) and stochastic modelling (using complex algorithms to play out thousands of “what-if” scenarios).

Essentially, we study past fires to evaluate how a landscape is likely to foster or fight future fires and assess to what extent we are potentially exposed or threatened by them. To quantify this exposure, we first identify the specific drivers that cause ignitions: human or natural. Then, we set thousands of theoretical fires loose across a ‘digital twin’ of the landscape.

We run these simulations under various climate settings to generate realistic patterns of fire exposure. The result is a set of clear, actionable metrics (Fig. 2) that tell us not just where a fire is likely to strike, but how virulent it will be.

This transition from reactive to proactive allows us to implement truly effective strategies. Whether it’s rearranging forest fuels, updating urban building codes, or designing fire-smart neighbourhoods, these decisions are rooted in data.

How this helps during emergencies

The true test of these technologies occurs during an active emergency. In an operational setting, fire spread modelling shifts from strategic

planning to a race against time. UC San Diego’s exemplary WIFIRE Program, for instance, provides real-time information to wildfire responders.

By integrating near-real-time satellite data with high-resolution weather forecasts, researchers can generate projections that predict a fire’s path over the coming hours.

One of the most effective tools in operational evacuation is the use of “isochrones” – contour lines on a map that represent the fire’s predicted arrival time (e.g. 30, 60, or 90 minutes from the current position).

Overlaying these contour lines with trigger points (specific ridges, roads, or landmarks) lets emergency managers automate the decision-making process.

The Axa science philanthropy is now part of the Axa Foundation for Human Progress, which brings together the commitments of Axa Group and Mutuelles d'Assurances in the fields of Science, Nature, Solidarity, and Culture. Before 2025, the global science philanthropy was held by the Axa Research Fund, which has supported over 750 projects around the world since its inception back in 2007. To learn more, visit Axa Foundation for Human Progress.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Marcos Rodrigues Mimbrero a reçu des financements de Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Univesidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, AXA Research Fund.

Jorge Félez Bernal a reçu des financements de AXA Research Foundation.

Alors que le trafic aérien mondial a retrouvé, voire dépassé, ses niveaux d’avant-Covid, les personnels de la recherche français auxquels nous sous sommes intéressés font exception : leurs déplacements en avion ont été divisés par deux par rapport à 2019, et cette baisse se maintient dans le temps.

Nos récentes analyses montrent que ces scientifiques, toutes disciplines confondues, se déplacent aux mêmes endroits et pour les mêmes raisons, mais deux fois moins qu’auparavant. Résultat : les émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) liées aux déplacements professionnels ont, elles aussi, été divisées par deux, sans qu’aucune contrainte réglementaire ne l’ai imposé.

Comment ces résultats ont-ils été obtenus ?

Nous avons analysé la plus grande base de données existante sur l’empreinte carbone de la recherche, construite par le groupement de recherche (GDR) Labos 1point5 grâce à l’outil libre et open source GES 1point5.

La base de données ainsi constituée regroupe près d’un million de déplacements professionnels réalisés entre 2019 et 2024 dans environ un tiers des laboratoires de recherche français. Cette base, construite grâce au travail collaboratif de centaines de laboratoires de recherche volontaires, permet de suivre l’évolution du nombre de déplacements, des distances parcourues, des modes de transport utilisés (avion, train) et des émissions de gaz à effet de serre associées. Elle est basée sur les listings de voyages financés par les laboratoires. Le nombre de déplacements, vérifiés et corrigés ligne à ligne peut enfin être normalisé par le nombre de personnels du laboratoire.

Nous avons « décomposé » les émissions de GES annuelles de façon à répondre à trois questions simples :

• Voyage-t-on moins souvent ?
• Voyage-t-on moins loin ?
• Utilise-t-on des modes de transport moins carbonés ?

Nous montrons que la diminution de la fréquence des déplacements, tous modes confondus, explique à elle seule environ la moitié de la réduction totale des émissions observée depuis 2019. Ensuite, la distance moyenne parcourue par déplacement diminue d’environ 17 %, et l’intensité carbone moyenne par kilomètre parcouru diminue d’environ 20 %. Cette évolution de la baisse de l’intensité carbone tient avant tout à la montée en proportion du ferroviaire, nettement moins émetteur que l’aérien.

En quoi est-ce important ?

Les déplacements professionnels représentent une part importante de l’empreinte carbone de la recherche (environ 25 % en 2019). Montrer qu’il est possible de diviser ces émissions par deux remet en cause l’idée selon laquelle la mobilité aérienne serait incompressible dans les métiers compétitifs, collaboratifs ou fortement internationalisés.

Le contraste entre la recherche et d’autres secteurs professionnels, où le trafic aérien semble repartir à la hausse, malgré des informations fragmentaires, suggère que cette transformation est à relier à une certaine autonomie organisationnelle du champ scientifique ainsi, éventuellement, au consensus scientifique autour des enjeux climatiques.

Cette réduction drastique des émissions de GES invite à nuancer l’idée que l’absence de régulation contraignante généralisée – qu’elle soit imposée par le haut au niveau national ou par le bas dans les laboratoires – signifie une incapacité à dépasser la seule quantification des émissions de GES. Nos résultats suggèrent au contraire que des transformations importantes ont eu lieu, en l’absence de politiques climatiques ambitieuses. L’appropriation de la question climatique au sein des laboratoires, accompagnée par des initiatives dédiées telles que Labos 1point5, a pu y contribuer.

Nos résultats plaident enfin pour un « verrouillage vertueux », qui permettrait d’éviter un retour progressif aux niveaux d’émissions de gaz à effet de serre antérieur au Covid.

Quelles suites à cette recherche ?

Il reste à comprendre plus finement pourquoi cette transformation s’est maintenue dans le temps, et si elle est parfaitement représentative de l’ensemble de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. Plusieurs facteurs peuvent être en jeu pour expliquer nos observations : les effets durables de la pandémie sur l’offre et la demande en déplacements, la généralisation et la diversification des usages de la visioconférence, la hausse du prix des billets d’avion et de train, mais aussi la diffusion progressive de nouvelles normes de sobriété dans le monde académique.

La question devient alors celle d’une possible écologisation du monde académique : assiste-t-on à une redéfinition progressive de ce qui est considéré comme une mobilité légitime ou nécessaire dans la recherche ? Répondre à cette question est crucial pour comprendre si les évolutions observées sont conjoncturelles ou le signe d’une transformation plus profonde du secteur, ainsi que leur possible diffusion à d’autres secteurs. Des études similaires conduites dans d’autres pays seront nécessaires pour mieux comprendre les déterminants et la stabilité des changements observés en France.

Tout savoir en trois minutes sur des résultats récents de recherches, commentés et contextualisés par les chercheuses et les chercheurs qui les ont menées, c’est le principe de nos « Research Briefs ». Un format à retrouver ici.

Tamara Ben Ari est co-fondatrice de Labos 1point5

Léa Marquet et Philippe-e. Roche ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.