Overview

Description

Wildfires are increasingly problematic in Europe, with recent unprecedented events causing extensive damage near Wildland-Urban Interface settlements. These fires pose complex civil protection challenges, highlighting a lack of awareness and preparedness among affected communities. Inspired by successful international frameworks like Firewise and FireSmart, FIREPRIME aims to establish an EU-wide program promoting fire resilience in WUI communities. It will develop a toolkit including a smartphone app, guidelines, and educational materials, aimed at enhancing wildfire resilience in three critical targets: households, communities, and infrastructure. It will be tested in three European regions: Barcelona (Spain), Tyrol (Austria), and Gothenburg (Sweden). The project prioritizes inclusivity and collaboration with local stakeholders to ensure responsiveness to diverse needs. Lessons learned will inform a strategic plan for sustainable project handover and exploitation in other fire-prone European regions.

A multi-disciplinary highly qualified consortium has been assembled with largely recognized expertise on wildfire management research and implementation projects.

UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, COO) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research with engineering background and large experience on technological, environmental and natural risk reduction research projects (https://certec.upc.edu). UPC has large experience on EU and national project coordination dealing with wildland-urban interface fires (e.g. WUIVIEW, WUTIPS, WUICOM-Barcelona). UPC will coordinate the action (Project Coordinator: Prof. Elsa Pastor)

PCF (Pau Costa Foundation, BEN) is a non‐profit organization, based in Spain, acting as an international platform devoted to wildland fires and fire ecology management, training and dissemination. PCF has a large experience in international projects and cooperation activities (P.I.: Mr. Guillem Canaleta).

RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden, BEN) is a Swedish technical research institution with a broad focus on infrastructure as well as the built and natural environment. RISE has performed many studies on boreal forests fuel characterization, risk assessment and fire behaviour, and on the characterisation of fire spread from vegetation to buildings. RISE has also previous experience in past DG-ECHO funded WUIVIEW project (P.I.: Dr. Johan Sjöström).

UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, BEN) is a public institution dedicated to higher education and research with social science background, specialised in disaster resilience. The activity of the UOC group CareNet is devoted to developing participatory, inclusive, and community-centred approaches on disaster and crisis management and addressing the exclusion of the most disadvantaged and voiceless groups in society from disaster, emergency, and crisis management (P.I.: Dr. Israel Rodríguez).

BOKU (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, BEN). The Institute for Mountain Risk Engineering (IAN) at BOKU is an international centre of research and education in environmental sciences, specialized particularly in natural hazards in mountain regions and is strongly involved in hazard assessment, event documentation, design of mitigation measures, risk analysis and vulnerability assessment for various mountain hazards including wildfire. (P.I. Dr. Maria Papathoma-Köhle).

Project content

News

Towards a European programme for wildfire-prepared communities

Well-prepared WUI communities against the growing intensity and magnitude of wildfires are key to the challenging work of civil protection services.

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