Fire-smart solutions for sustainable wildfire risk prevention: Bottom-up initiatives meet top-down policies under EU green deal

This study investigates key fuel management initiatives for wildfire risk prevention in southern European Union (EU) countries. Fuel management for wildfire risk prevention generally lacks economic sustainability. In marginal areas of southern Europe, this limits fuel treatment programs from reaching the critical mass of required treated area to modify landscape flammability, the fire regime and its impacts.

The authors compared local approaches through a bottom-up selection of 38 initiatives, which we analyzed systematically through a set of fire-smart criteria: sustainability, cost-benefit ratio, synergies and inter-sectoral cooperation, integration between strategic prevention planning and multiple land governance goals (e.g., rural development, biodiversity conservation, energy supply), innovation and knowledge transfer, and adaptive management. The researchers summarized lessons learned from the most innovative initiatives, by identifying solutions and functional approaches for building sustainable fuel management at the landscape scale, under fire-smart management principles. These make synergistic use of private, public and European resources to activate value chains that valorize the products, by-products and services generated by fuel management activities and their positive externalities on ecosystem services.