Report on WUI fire prevention and emergency management in Europe: a state of the art and guidelines for improvement (D1.1)

This document provides a state-of-the-art on regulations and legislations existing
through European countries about forest fire at the wildland-urban interfaces
(WUI), and on prevention measures and operational protocols applicable in
the different European countries, mainly France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Even if
the problem of forest fires at wildland-urban interfaces is similar in all those
countries, their approaches have not reached the same stage. French and Portugese
contexts are clear and usable (even if not always respected by the population
) as well as in some regions in Spain, whereas Italian one for example is less
complete. Prevention policies can emerge from different entities, from local
municipalities to national levels, but also from European projects.
In order to be as accurate as possible about forest fires at the wildland-urban
interfaces, techniques and issues related to operational cartography, symbology
and communications in those specific areas are also taken into account and risk
mapping techniques are reported. On the whole, from an operational point of
view, no specific protocol exists for the WUI whatever the considered country,
and fire fighting in those areas rest on field knowledge, and incident commander
expertise. Useful input would come from risk maps, thanks to new technical
developments.