Operational tools and Guidelines for improving efficiency in wildfire risk reduction in EU landscapes

Under future climate change scenarios, all EU countries may undergo increased risk of wildfires, and therefore civil protection and global emergency management will become increasingly important. This expected trend, will affect areas that historically have not experienced significant impact from wildfire events and a large proportion of damage is likely to be related with high-severity of fires. These typologies of fires affecting forests nowadays are not just a factor of risk for forest but a global emergency involving forest values, civil protection and land planning. The need to adapt wildfire risk management strategies to the changing context of risk is urgent and not always easy due to the fact that frequency of extreme events in a particular region is low. Actions should focus on reducing the likelihood of the occurrence of extreme wildfires and the severity of damage and impacts on people and ecosystems if extreme wildfires do occur. In parallel, wildfire risk management strategies are being significantly improved in terms of
efficiency and operational impact. Innovative knowledge and practices in fire management and fire behavior assessment offer a powerful tool for improving cost-effective emergency response, which enhances the effective integration of wildfire risk into land planning or allows better defining the role of the actors responsible for reducing wildfire hazard and risk in the landscape (from forestry to land planners and homeowners in urban interface). In this book we aim to show that resilience of forests to wildfires can be improved through proper risk governance, good forest management and landscape planning activities.
This publication has been developed in the frame of the European project FIREfficient (Operational tools for improving efficiency in wildfire risk reduction in EU landscapes). The project seeks to build capacity for land planners through enhancing the transfer to them of best practices and lessons learned in wildfires. An extended version of each chapter can be found out in the project website and the Lessons on fire platform created with the project.