Island vulnerability and resilience to wildfires: A case study of Corsica

Abstract

The number of wildfires occurring globally is exacerbated by urbanisation and changes in weather patterns. In response, researchers have conducted studies of wildfires and human behaviour in regions such as Australia and the USA. Regions in Europe have received less attention, despite facing the same issues. Even more overlooked are one particular type of territory: islands. With their climates, islands across the Mediterranean remain attractive second home and tourist destinations, resulting in urban development. Yet due to certain features (e.g. cultural, socio-political, geographical), the ways in which their people deal with wildfires may differ somewhat from that in some mainland territories. This paper explores human behaviour in wildfire emergencies in the context of island vulnerability and resilience in Europe, with the Mediterranean island of Corsica as a case study. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 8) with Corsican professionals involved in wildfire management and quantitative analysis of around 100 surveys from civilians was conducted. This analysis revealed that Corsica's population approach to wildfire safety is shaped by available information as well as a strong risk culture, which stands in contrast with new/temporary residents moving into the island each summer season. The results drawn from the analysed sample suggest potential social vulnerability in wildfires when a decision to evacuate the population is taken by emergency managers as the most effective emergency response. Population behaviour were not influenced by property attachment, perceived risk, hazard knowledge, community closeness and locus of control, suggesting that island WUI resident characteristics may not be generalised from human behaviour in wildfires studies carried out in the USA or Australia.

Vulnerability Variables and Their Effect on Wildfires in Galicia (Spain). A Panel Data Analysis

“…Fixed effect panel data models identify the effects of explanatory variables based on withinmunicipality variation, while random panel data models assume that the overall effect of omitted variables is randomly distributed over time and municipalities and is therefore uncorrelated with other explanatory variables [57]. The results demonstrate this effect and also illustrate the importance of meteorological variables, considering that wildfires are caused by human activity as well as by natural phenomena [7].…”

“…Although the characteristics of fires (ignition, extension, and ratio hectares burned/ ignitions) change over time and vary in response to the interaction and dependencies between fire, people, and biophysical features, the most influential driver of change in fire frequency comes from the population, rather than from the existing climate and flora [7,22]. However, research on social factors and wildfire risk receives less attention than does investigation focused on the effect of climate variability on forest fires [23].…”

“…Moving on to the wildfires issue, it must be taken into account that most wildfires are caused by human activity, fuel availability, and meteorological variables together [7][8][9]. Therefore, socio-economic variables such as the structure and density of the population, income per capita, or GDP in a territory affected by wildfires become as important as meteorological variables and fuel [6,10,11].…”

“…For this reason, it is necessary to identify the factors that could play an important role in prevention and mitigation [15,[30][31][32]. However, there is a lack of integration between social and biophysical systems in community wildfires-protection planning and very few studies describe how prevention could be improved considering the analysis of social and biophysical factors together [7,19,24,33].…”

Mathematical simulation of forest fire front influence on wood-based building using one-dimensional model of heat transfer

“…Social damage is expressed in the number of people injured or dead in forest fires. In WUI territories, residential buildings can be involved in combustion processes [3][4][5][6][7][8]. The main impact of a forest fire is directed on the enclosing structures of a residential or industrial building [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”