Europe is ready to harness innovative solutions to address Extreme Wildfire Events

Europe is facing an ever-growing number of extreme wildfires, often with devastating consequences for people and the environment. According to the European Forest Fire Information System, 2021 was the second-worst wildfire season in the European Union since 2000, when EFFIS records began. In that year, an area of 500.566ha was burnt in the EU27 and 417.807ha in other European countries. These fires no longer affect only or mainly southern Europe, but also central European and Nordic countries. For instance, 22 out of the 27 EU member states were affected.
The underlying causes of these fires and their devastating impacts – such as climate change, urbanisation and changing consumption patterns (driven by both tertiarisation and globalisation) – are here to stay. They highlight the limits of long-standing suppression-centred fire management strategies. That’s why practitioners, researchers, and policymakers increasingly recognise the need to develop novel approaches that expand the scope of work in this field.
Such innovative solutions need to understand that the landscapes at risk are not just physical assets such as forests and human homes or infrastructure. They consist of a multitude of ecological and social component parts and processes, whose resilience to the risk of fire needs to be improved.
The risk of wildfires consists not only of the hazard itself, and not even only of a combination of the hazard and exposure to it, but it lies at the intersection of hazard, exposure and vulnerability to both. Thus, vulnerability is a key consideration in continuously managing the challenge of fire – before, during and after the event.
To reduce landscapes’ and communities’ vulnerability to fire, all of society needs to work together to connect the dots. The root causes of fire need to be addressed through prevention, and effective preparation activities need to be devised. Its impacts need to be softened by fostering adaptation and ensuring recovery. All this needs to happen alongside the development of a more nuanced approach to managing wildfires rather than simply attempting to suppress them.
For, while the aim of suppressing, say, 98% of all ignitions seems, at face value, like a worthwhile endeavour, it is important to remember that a mere 2% of ignitions account for about 80% of the damage caused by wildland fires. Not to mention that successful suppression leads to a build-up of fuel loads for future fires!