Global change and mega-fires

Wildfires are becoming a major environmental, economic and social threat. In Europe, about 2% of all fires result in over 80% of the extent burnt, while even fewer extreme fires resulted in unprecedented numbers of lives lost, health consequences and property damage, as witnessed in Portugal, Greece, and, globally in USA, Australia.

Global change, exacerbates the root drivers of extreme fires, such as more frequent compound extreme weather events, longer fire seasons, bigger, dryer and more continuous fuel loads and increased wildland-urban interface. As a results, risk prone areas are expanding, exposing new ecosystems and communities, challenging current knowledge on fire behaviour contributing to a multi-risk environment where impacts are hard to predict.

These extreme wildfire events can easily overcome best available suppression capacities due to their biophysical characteristics (size, intensity, rate of spread, erratic behaviour) although less extreme fires can produce extreme impacts (ecological, socio-economic, human lives) in new fire prone, less risk- aware and prepared areas.

As a consequence, the limits of fire suppression-centred strategies have become evident, even in technologically well-equipped countries, due to their limited effectiveness when facing extreme fires and their high costs. Practitioners, researchers and policymakers increasingly recognise the need to develop novel, integrated approaches that shift the proactive emphasis to the root causes of extreme fires and their impacts moving from a more basic resilience focusing on reducing impacts and recovery, to pre-disaster conditions, to longer term adaptative approaches. What his mean in practice for Euskadi will be discussed.