“Burnt landscapes”: Improving Wildfire Management in Sensitive Hotspots

Fire prevention strategies have to deal with evolving environmental and socioeconomic scenarios. The combination of a warming climate, fuel patterns, and socioeconomic conditions is responsible for increasing large fires throughout Europe. In the last decades, simultaneous large fires often overwhelmed the suppression capacity of single countries – not only in fire-prone areas, but also in countries occasionally affected by such events. In the latter countries, wildfires result in more severe and long-lasting effects due to the lower fire resistance and resilience of forests. In order to cope with a changing world, the transfer of fire management strategies is mandatory, and original proposals on prevention actions based on broader sustainable land/forest management may increase wildfire response preparedness. These objectives 82 will be reached by sharing national, regional, and local good practices among countries with different operational experiences and skills, underlying different levels of response preparedness.