Towards a more practitioners-oriented research, Australian examples and FIRE-IN
Session: Research/Practitioner networking initiatives and future steps
Presenter: Sebastien Lahaye (Pau Costa Foundation)
Contact email: slahaye@paucostafoundation.org
The Pau Costa Foundation (PCF) serves as a coordination platform and contact point for exchanging knowledge on fire ecology and wildfire and crisis management. It works for and with the fire community to collect recommendations on crisis management, lessons learned and experiences and make them accessible to help develop efficient, effective and useful projects and services that contribute to improve the knowledge on wildfire and crisis management.
PCF is a leading organisation advocating a profound change in the concept of fire prevention towards a concept of fire resilient landscapes that will help mitigating climate change impacts. For this, PCF focuses on fire operations, support to applied research, promoting landscape management (planning and certification).
All actions are done under an effective dissemination strategy that helps transferring the expertise and knowledge to the interested actors. For this purpose, the foundation develops a large range of actions from local to international scales to bridge de gap between the fire community, research and society.
Link: www.paucostafoundation.org
ABSTRACT: The landscape of fire responders is greatly fragmented in Europe. There are as many fire agencies as countries, regions, departments or sometimes communities and, most of the time, the agencies face similar challenges.
The academic and research community can provide answers to many of these challenges and, actually, it has already done for some of the challenges. However, there is often a so poor connection between academics and practitioners that challenges often remain unaddressed or that scientific answers remain non-disseminated in the practitioners’ community.
The reasons for that can be for example the lack of practitioners implied in the research projects, or language or cultural gaps between scientists and practitioners.
The European Community encourages and funds initiatives that address this gap. In that perspective, FIRE-IN is a H2020 project that aims to develop the Fire & Rescue development process with capability-driven research and innovation supported by stronger guidance from practitioners. In the field of wildfires, representatives of the practitioners throughout Europe have already identified key challenges such as community awareness raising or organising the transfer of knowledges between experts.
Along with this European initiative, it is also interesting to look overseas. In Australia, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre is an interesting model of integrated research.
