Empowering strategic decision-making for wildfire management: avoiding the fear trap and creating a resilient landscape

Abstract

In recent years, fire services in Mediterranean Europe have been overwhelmed by extreme wildfire behavior. As a consequence, fire management has moved to defensive strategies with a focus only on the known risks (the fear trap). In this region, wildfires can change rapidly, increasing the uncertainty and causing complex operational scenarios that impact society right from the initial hours. To address this challenge, proactive approaches are an alternative to defensive and reactive strategies. We propose a methodology that integrates the uncertainty of decisions and the cost of each opportunity into the strategic decision-making process. The methodology takes into account values such as fire-fighting safety, organizational resilience, landscape resilience, and social values. Details of the methods and principles used to develop and implement a creative decision-making process that empower the fireline are provided. A tool that segregates the landscape into polygons of fire potential and defines the connectivity between those polygons is used. Two examples of operational implementation of this methodology are presented (2014 Tivissa Fire and 2015 Odena Fire). These methods facilitate the analysis of possible scenarios of resolution and the costs of the opportunities that help build resilient emergency response systems and prevent their collapse. Moreover, they help explain the risk to society and involve citizens in the decision-making process. These methods are based on the experience and lessons learned by European incident commanders, managers, and researchers collected during the last decade.

Geospatial Modeling of Containment Probability for Escaped Wildfires in a Mediterranean Region

“…On the other hand, it has been proposed that successfully controlling all small fires has positively contributed to the fuel build‐up increase problem in Mediterranean landscapes during the last decades (Otero & Nielsen, 2017). In this sense, it is worth noting that managing large fire‐prone areas requires an integrative perspective including the creation of fire‐adapted human communities, the generation of resilient landscapes, and the prevention of human‐induced undesired fire inception in addition to a safe and efficient wildfire response (Alcasena et al., 2019; Castellnou et al., 2019; Dunn et al., 2020). Still, a safe and efficient response is a core goal of wildfire management in Mediterranean areas where numerous smallholdings and disperse communities intermingle with poorly managed forest ecosystems.…”

Probability-Based Wildfire Risk Measure for Decision-Making

“…This assumption is the cornerstone of the methodology presented. It is a usual simplification taken both by researchers and firefighters [12,13,[17][18][19]22]. Although fire and landscape are naturally seen as a continuous phenomenon, preventive actions used to be taken within finite set of possible places and a network is an appropriate framework for these decisions.…”

“…In a recent study, Ref. [18] presents a methodology used by Catalan Fire and Rescue Service based on modelling landscape with a network. A case study of Odena (Spain) is shown where the landscape is divided into 23 sectors ( Figure 1).…”

Prototyping a Geospatial Atlas for Wildfire Planning and Management

“…As the complexity of wildland fire management has increased, so too has the need for risk-based decision support designed to enhance the safety and effectiveness of large fire management [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. In recent years, the fire science community has developed a wide range of operationally focused assessment and planning tools.…”