PREVAIL: PREVention Action Increases Large fire response preparedness

ended

Fire management organizations are confronting with evolving wildfire scenarios. The combination of extreme climate events and fuel accumulation is leading to increasingly large wildfires that often overwhelm the suppression capacity of single countries. Since 2007, the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) was activated 84 times (17 during 2017 only) to provide a coordinated response to extreme fire events. There is a need to shift fire management strategies towards changes in the spatial pattern and amount of fuels that allow wildfires to spin out of control. In this regard, PREVAIL is a cooperative project among 5 research organizations of fire prone European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) that aims at demonstrating how wildfire prevention can make large fire suppression more effective and less costly. Project target activities are: - statistical and econometric analysis of prevention, preparedness and suppression measures to counteract large fires; - simulation of past large fire events, to reconstruct fire behaviour and predict effects of alternative fuel management scenarios on the reduction of fire suppression effort; - determining best strategies to integrate prevention and preparedness to large-fire events, sharing and spreading “smart” solutions, implemented locally in partners’ countries, by trans-national training and producing material to raise awareness of citizens, land managers and fire operators; - developing a DSS to plan and optimize smart solutions at the water catchment scale to increase the leverage and cost-effectiveness of fuel management treatments and promote development of local economy ensuring their maintenance in a climate change context. PREVAIL will provide empirical knowledge, practical tools and analytical techniques to improve UCPM effectiveness in the fire disaster management cycle (prevention-preparedness-response), in terms of cost optimization and large fire risk reduction.