GMV to organize five demonstrations to develop a holistic European wildfire management strategy

The technology multinational GMV is playing a key role in the international research project FirEUrisk, designed to develop a holistic wildfire management strategy. The European Union has granted this Horizon 2020 project 10 million euros to work towards a paradigm shift in wildfire management, prioritizing holistic prevention of the ignition risk over costly firefighting and suppression once the fire has already broken out.

This management will center on identifying risk factors, adapting management strategies to expected future climate and socio-economic changes, improving the emergency response plan and impact assessment to facilitate post-fire restoration. The solutions to these problems will be developed at a local scale and then adapted to prevention-, firefighting- and restoration-needs at a regional and pan-European scale.

Under this overarching strategy GMV is coordinating two particularly important tasks:

1) Assessment of the cascade effects of forest fires: Cascade effects pertain to both the causes and consequences of fires, especially such features as rising temperatures; longer droughts; weakening of woodland due to pests, soil-erosion and -compaction; runoff; landslips: floods; loss of biomass and carbon sequestration.

2) Demonstration of project ideas at a Europe-wide level and in five selected regions: the County of Kalmar (Sweden), Central Europe (Brandenburg and Saxony in Germany, Bohemia in the Czech Republic and Silesia in Poland), central Portugal, Barcelona (Spain) and Attica (Greece).

The project, run by a multidisciplinary consortium of 39 organizations from 19 countries, will demonstrate the scalability of the ideas: standardized risk indices, forecasting methods based on climate change, fire aftermath, technical training syllabi and action protocols for firefighting brigades and reduction of fire risk for the public at large, among others.

FirEUrisk: project for better wildfire management

Wildfires pose a huge risk to forests, upsetting their ecological balance and undermining their healthiness. COVID-19 lockdown restraints hindered winter undergrowth clearance, a situation exacerbated by heavy snowfalls that have added tons of biomass to this undergrowth. All these factors have boosted ignition risk during the following fire season.

With this problem in mind the European Union is determined to lower wildfire risk. It has therefore recently launched the FirEUrisk project, designed to develop, evaluate and disseminate a science-based integrated strategy to prevent forest fires in Europe. This marks a paradigm shift from costly fire-suppression methods to a new approach based on groundbreaking technology, training, guidelines and policy recommendations to improve wildfire management and reduce the most harmful effects.

To this end the Portuguese Association for Development of Industrial Aerodynamics (Asociación portuguesa para el Desarrollo de la Aerodinámica Industrial: ADAI) is leading a multidisciplinary consortium of 39 organizations from 19 countries to achieve this paradigm shift in wildfire management, developing bespoke solutions and services and building up experience for tackling the challenges posed by current forest fire conditions in Europe and those forecast for the upcoming decades.

This multidisciplinary team includes researchers, professionals, legislators and citizens, who will study the wildfire proneness and resilience of the areas under study, including the impact of policies on land use. They will also look at how socioeconomic problems and human activity impinge on this fire proneness. The upshot will be regional and Europe-wide planning approaches to increase the safety of local communities, improving nature-based solutions to be put through their paces in pilot sites and demonstration areas in the north, center and south of Europe.

All this is expected to reduce the negative effects of fires, such as human causalities (morbidity and fatality), wildlife loss, cultural losses, losses of public and private propriety and social upsets stemming from major infrastructure damage and impairment of natural capital. The results of this 10-million-euro project will be generated over a 4-year period running from April 2021 to March 2025.

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