Pan-European wildfire risk assessment

Wildfires, as a global phenomenon, are an integral part of the Earth system which affects different regions of the planet quite unevenly. They are of great concern in Europe: in the European Union alone, over 4000 km2 of our land were burnt in 2019; 3400 km2 in 2020; 5000 km2 in 2021. Depending on the proximity to where people live, and the extent and typology of ecosystems and goods exposed in areas vulnerable to wildfires, the level of risk may vary greatly. However, many components contribute to worsen or mitigate the risk, so that their interplay is not always easy to predict, and the natural variability of climate, environmental, and human factors is an intrinsic part of the problem. The impacts of wildfires may result in long-lasting effects to social, environmental, and economic systems.
In a context of global heating along with many other rapidly changing aspects of climate and of our human activity, and extreme events becoming more frequent, the report points out that it is crucial to respond with more robust preparedness and planning, identifying spatially the risks posed by wildland fires, to foster better fire management policy tools, and develop mitigation strategies accordingly. However, given the irreducible complexity of the problem, scope and methods for wildfire risk assessment vary widely among countries and research teams leading to different regional/national approaches that are not always comparable, although wildfires are often trans-border events and may affect several countries simultaneously. These uneven approaches understandably focus on the corresponding regions of interest, and the chosen methods are affected by the specificities of each country.
The development of a pan-European approach follows from a series of European Union (EU) regulations requiring the European Commission (EC) to have a wide overview of the wildfire risk in Europe, to support the actions of its Member States and to ensure compliance in the implementation of EU regulations related to wildfires.

The conceptualization of a European Wildfire Risk Assessment (WRA) as the combined impact of wildfire hazard on people, ecosystems, and goods exposed in vulnerable areas, explicitly accounts for the multiplicity of risk dimensions and sources of uncertainty. Already serving as an integrated framework for gathering the European countries’ experience on fire management and risk, it will support the inter-comparison of WRA among countries, with the aim to complement existing national WRA with a simpler, but harmonised, methodology.

A semi-quantitative approach, designed to be robust to uncertainty and flexible in ingesting new components, has led to the development of the first pan-European prototype WRA version, while maintaining its development in close cooperation with the EC Joint Research Centre (JRC), other Commission services, and the Commission Expert Group on Forest Fires which is now composed of fire management representatives from 43 countries in the region. Additionally, the harmonised framework can serve as a first approach for assessing wildfire risk in those countries that have not yet performed a national WRA, and as a guideline for extending the approach to larger areas, where data coverage may be scarcer and more uncertain.