Forging fire-resilient landscapes: fire-smart solutions for sustainable wildfire risk prevention

Forging fire resilient forested landscapes is acknowledged as a key strategy for large wildfires risk reduction. Fuel management, though, generally lacks economic sustainability. Consequently, in marginal areas of southern Europe, fuel treatment programs hardly reach the critical scale of interventions required to significantly modify landscape flammability. This work presents some key fuel management initiatives implemented in agro-silvopastoral Mediterranean landscapes to show the breadth of possibilities to make wildfire risk prevention sustainable in such territorial settings. Initiatives were selected in the framework of the European project PREVAIL (PREVention Action Increases Large fire response preparedness) through bottom-up identification of a sample of 38 projects in four countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece). The sample was analysed systematically through a set of fire-smart criteria: (i) sustainability, (ii) cost-efficiency in risk reduction, (iii) synergies and cooperation, (iv) knowledge exchange and transfer, and (v)adaptive management. Lessons learned are summarized to identify solutions and functional approaches to scale up the implementation of sustainable fuel management under fire-smart territories principles. Fire-smart solutions use private, public and European funding in synergy to activate value chains from products, by-products, and ecosystem services generated by fuel management activities. The financial mechanisms include fire marketing, Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes, specific taxes, or environmental compensatory measures. These mechanisms catalyze the interest of multiple stakeholders, thus increasing the cost-efficiency of landscape fuel management while reinforcing the sense of commitment of society to the making of more fire-resilient forested landscape