Landscape Fire crisis mitigation

Objectives

• Analyze drivers and underlying causes of increasing wildfire severity and vulnerability of European landscapes and societies
• Exchange views across sectors, responsibilities and borders
• Analyze gaps in the tools for landscape fire disaster-risk reduction
• Define and prioritize future R&D efforts

Main areas of focus

Fires affecting natural landscapes (natural forests, bush/shrub land, range lands, peat lands), cultural landscapes (industrial plantation forests, open land ecosystems such as anthropogenic grasslands / pasture lands, other agricultural lands), protected areas and urban-industrial landscapes.

The required expertise to reduce wildfire-hazard and wildfire disaster-risk needs to be derived from many scientific disciplines, sectoral institutional knowledge and the known or unknown needs and requirements of affected civil society and meet rather diverse challenges:

• Fire prevention (reduced human-caused ignitions)
• Wildfire-hazard reduction (fuel reduction)
• Fire-use in ecosystem management (use of prescribed fire for conservation / biodiversity management and wildfire-hazard reduction) and for wildfire suppression (suppression firing)
• Public policies to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience of the environment and society, notably human health and security risks (e.g. through smoke pollution, high-risk residential areas, critical infrastructure, communications etc.)
• Inclusion and empowerment of civil society in wildfire prevention, safe fire-use and self-defense against wildfires
• Innovative development of methods and technologies for suppression of wildfires
• Specialized training and equipment of F&R services
• Cooperation and interoperability between landscape fire management, structural and HAZMAT fire management for wildfires at the interface between vegetated lands, rural residential and peri-urban areas
• Fire management on dangerous / high-threat terrain (vegetation contaminated by unexploded ordnance [UXO], chemical / waste deposits or radioactivity)
• Management of multiple simultaneous wildfire events and extreme wildfire crises
• Cross-boundary / international cooperation in fire management through guidelines, rules and protocols aimed at enhancing coordination, interoperability, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of managing multinational cooperation in wildfire emergencies

Useful link: LESSONS ON FIRE is a user-friendly digital platform dedicated to wildfires:  https://lessonsonfire.eu 

Download the "Policy Brief Landscape Fires Crisis Mitigation" produced by the TWG leaders, in coordination with other partners and associated experts