Dynamic Infrastructures and Resilient Communities: a Systemic Approach to Wildfire Risk Mitigation and Adaptation

forthcoming

In response to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires, RESILFIRE addresses the urgent need to enhance the resilience of interdependent power and communication infrastructures in wildfire-prone regions. With global warming projected to intensify, especially in areas like California and Mediterranean Europe, wildfire risks have escalated, causing significant socio-economic disruptions. This project aims to fill critical research gaps using a systemic approach to develop a Fire Sociotechnical Model that integrates P&C infrastructures with social inequalities, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of wildfire on vulnerable communities. By combining wildfire spread models, real infrastructure data, and spatial analysis of social inequalities, the project will propose a new dynamic infrastructure design procedure. This aims at implementing interventions to improve robustness, redundancy, and flexibility of the networks to extend their functionality during heatwaves and wildfires emergencies. Ensuring continuity of service is crucial to reduce impact on mental and physical health and to timely mobilize evacuees. The project will validate these models and procedures simulating several wildfire scenarios on relevant case studies, fostering cross-regional applicability. RESILFIRE will deliver actionable outcomes, including a wildfire adaptive resilience assessment method that accounts for the variability of resources in the recovery phase. The results will be presented through user-friendly web tools documenting the case studies, and a virtual reality environment. By addressing the interactions between infrastructure performance and social inequality, RESILFIRE aims to set new benchmarks for wildfire risk mitigation and climate adaptation across vulnerable communities.