The FirEUrisk report

Project partners, end-users and collaborating wildfire-related initiatives gathered at our hybrid annual plenary meeting between March 30th and April 1st in the beautiful city of Coimbra, Portugal. In the conference portion of the meeting, all relevant aspects of the project´s wildfire management strategy were covered – results were presented, plans were discussed and opinions were shared. All in all, it was a very fruitful meeting to look back at the developments of the project and to lay the foundations for a stronger collaboration in the years to come! Project Officer Nicolas Faivre also joined some sessions of the conference with some helpful feedback. You can find all partner presentations from the meeting in the project´s Sharepoint.

As part of the events of the meeting, a visit to the Laboratory for Forest Fire Studies (LEIF) was kindly organised by project partners ADAI on Day 2. Project members were able to observe and understand several critical aspects of fire propagation, control and management thanks to this excellent visit complete with real-time experiments and demonstrations.

On Day 3, a field trip was organised as part of the meeting, again by project partners ADAI, to visit the areas affected by the 2017 wildfires of Portugal. Partners were able to get a first-person insight into the events that precipitated these devastating wildfires and understand the degree of damages they caused. The field trip also included a visit to Ferraria de São João where there were excellent interactions with citizen scientists and end users of the project.

A kick-off for the WFRM cluster projects

Multiple webinars have been conducted over the past year by our project to tackle key issues in wildfire risks such as fire management, lessons learned from major fire events, and crisis management. If you didn’t have a chance to watch, you can check the webinar’s recordings available on our website under “Resources”. We look forward to more such events being organised in the near future.

FirEUrisk hit the Portuguese national television, on a show focused on the changing nature of forest fires. Biosfera – “Conhecer o fogo” (meaning “understanding fire”) was aired on May 7th, 2022, on RTP2. With appearances from our project coordinator and a short clip of our motion graphic animation, the show covered the project’s strategy and goals.

In the aftermath of the major fires that devastated Portugal in 2017, Professor Domingos Xavier Viegas explained how research is developing better ways to prevent high intensity fires: “Solutions for studying the vegetation, alternative ways of engineering the landscape, methods of reducing the risk of fire, protecting people, or what must be done after a fire”. The project’s recommendations will be put to the test on-site, in Portugal, to better protect the population, the infrastructures, and the environment.

Ukraine is currently struggling with the war, and this situation influences all regular activities. However, our colleagues from the Regional Eastern Europe Fire Monitoring Center (REEFMC), continue to work towards FirEUrisk and have even proposed extending the demonstration area to Northern Ukraine, where the war has created a peculiar and challenging environment for wildfires and fire management – the possibilitiy of fires crossing minefields, the use of cluster bombs, restrictions to fire aviation due to the use of the air space for combat operations, and a general shortage of firefighting personnel due to army call-ups, etc. Such an anomalous situation is associated with an increased risk for extreme wildfires in the scotch pine forests that occupy the Northern part of the country (Ukrainian Polissia), greatly affecting the local communities that live in these areas. REEFMC will extend FirEUrisk’s activity in this region by closely monitoring the fire situation and working on fire risk assessment and risk reduction based in line with FirEUrisk´s developments. The entire FirEUrisk consortium will adapt the project plan to support these developments, driven by the REEFMC.

Are you planning on talking about FirEUrisk? Take a look at the following resources, tailored to help you reach different audiences

Motion graphic animation – a 2 minute video explaining the project to a wide audience

Also make sure to visit our blog, where we interview partners and publish exclusive content to keep you updated. If you’d like to be featured, please drop us a line and we’ll get in touch to discuss it.