Editorial for the Special Issue: Nature-Based Solutions to Extreme Wildfires

Abstract

Extreme wildfires are becoming increasingly frequent and severe across many regions worldwide, driven by climate change, land-use transitions, and long-standing fire-suppression legacies. In this context, Nature-based Solutions (NbSs)—defined as actions that work with ecological processes to address societal challenges while providing biodiversity and socio-economic benefits—offer a promising yet underdeveloped pathway for enhancing wildfire resilience. This Special Issue brings together eleven contributions spanning empirical ecology, landscape configuration, simulation modelling, spatial optimisation, ecosystem service analysis, governance assessment, and community-based innovation. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that restoring ecological fire regimes, promoting multifunctional landscapes, and integrating advanced decision support tools can substantially reduce wildfire hazard while sustaining ecosystem functions. They also reveal significant governance barriers, including fragmented policies, limited investment in prevention, and challenges in incorporating social demands into territorial planning. By synthesising these insights, this editorial identifies several strategic priorities for advancing NbSs in fire-prone landscapes: mainstreaming prevention within governance frameworks, strengthening the science–practice interface, investing in long-term socio-ecological monitoring, managing trade-offs transparently, and empowering local communities. Together, the findings highlight that effective NbSs emerge from the alignment of ecological, technological, institutional, and social dimensions, offering a coherent pathway toward more resilient, biodiverse, and fire-adaptive landscapes.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, the frequency and severity of large and extreme wildfires have increased across many regions of the world [1], driven by climate change, land-use transitions, and fire suppression legacies [2,3,4]. These extreme wildfire events (EWEs)—by definition, fires that overwhelm suppression capacity—are characterised by erratic and unpredictable behaviour, rapid spread, and intense energy release [5]. They pose severe threats to firefighting crews, local populations, infrastructure, and natural assets, and often result in profound socio-economic and environmental impacts. The increasing occurrence of such extreme events, together with broader fire regime shifts—including changes in fire seasonality, frequency, and intensity—has fundamentally challenged conventional fire management approaches that rely primarily on suppression and short-term emergency response [5,6,7]. In parallel, a new paradigm has emerged that acknowledges fire as an essential ecological process in many ecosystems and promotes its sustainable coexistence with human and natural systems [8,9].

The concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbSs) emerged in the early 2000s within the fields of ecological engineering and biodiversity conservation, as a response to the need for strategies that work with ecological processes rather than against them [10,11]. Throughout the 2010s, the term was progressively formalised and mainstreamed by international organisations—most notably the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and later the European Commission—becoming an operational framework to address societal challenges through ecosystem protection, restoration, and sustainable management [12]. NbSs have since been incorporated into major global policy instruments, including the Paris Agreement, EU Biodiversity Strategy, and EU Adaptation Strategy, highlighting their potential to deliver simultaneous environmental, social, and economic benefits.

In the last decade, NbSs have been applied across a diverse set of environmental and societal domains. Their use is now well established in climate change adaptation and mitigation, where ecosystem restoration and conservation enhance carbon sequestration and increase resilience to climate extremes [13]. NbSs have also become central to disaster risk reduction, helping to regulate floods, landslides, drought impacts, and coastal hazards through ecosystem-based approaches [14,15]. Despite this rapid expansion across domains such as climate adaptation, water management, and urban resilience, the application of NbSs to extreme wildfires remains comparatively underdeveloped [16]. In addition, most wildfire governance frameworks continue to prioritise suppression and emergency response, with limited emphasis on preventive, landscape-scale strategies grounded in ecological processes, biodiversity conservation, and socio-ecological resilience [9,17,18]. This imbalance creates a substantial implementation gap: societies increasingly face unprecedented wildfire extremes, yet lack integrated approaches that work with, rather than against, natural ecosystem dynamics [19]. Addressing this gap is therefore central to the motivation of the present Special Issue, which aims to advance knowledge, identify opportunities, and promote operational pathways for NbSs in fire-prone landscapes.

This Special Issue, “Nature-Based Solutions to Extreme Wildfires”, brings together diverse perspectives, disciplines, and geographies to address this paradigm shift. Its goal is to connect scientific evidence with policy and practice, providing insights into how ecological understanding, technological innovation, and governance coherence can converge to promote fire-smart and resilient landscapes. The contributions include case studies from Europe, Latin America, North America, and Siberia, collectively illustrating the potential and challenges of operationalizing NbS for wildfire management at multiple scales.

2. Aim and Rationale of the Special Issue

This Special Issue was conceived to foster dialogue between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working at the intersection of fire ecology, landscape planning, and environmental governance. Its central premise is that effective wildfire risk management must integrate ecological processes, land-use dynamics, and socio-institutional considerations, moving beyond the traditional focus on emergency response.

Within this context, NbSs provide a unifying framework for designing prevention-oriented, fire-resilient landscapes. According to the European Commission, NbSs are defined as “solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, and simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience.” Such solutions have strong potential to support decision- and policymakers in coping with extreme wildfires while safeguarding biodiversity and ensuring the long-term supply of ecosystem services [10,12,20].

This Special Issue aims, therefore, to identify and assess NbSs that directly address the societal challenge posed by extreme wildfires, with a particular emphasis on approaches that bridge science, policy, and practice. To this end, submissions were encouraged when they engaged with at least two of the three major dimensions—wildfire hazard management, biodiversity, and ecosystem services—and examined one or more of the following themes:

• Effects of fire management on ecosystem services.
• Effects of fire management on biodiversity.
• Trade-offs between fire mitigation and ecosystem services.
• Trade-offs between fire mitigation and biodiversity.
• Cost–benefit analyses of fire management strategies.

Collectively, these themes underscore the need for integrated approaches that align ecological processes with governance innovation and territorial planning. By consolidating diverse research across regions and disciplines, this Special Issue seeks to advance the conceptual and operational foundations for implementing NbS in wildfire-prone landscapes, and to stimulate new pathways toward fire-resilient socio-ecological systems.

3. Synthesis of Contributions

The eleven papers published in this Special Issue collectively illustrate how ecological understanding, landscape planning, modelling tools, governance frameworks, and community-based innovation converge to shape NbSs in fire-prone regions. Together, they offer a multi-scalar perspective on the drivers of extreme wildfires and the opportunities to address them through integrated, prevention-oriented strategies.

Several articles focus on the ecological and biophysical foundations needed to inform NbSs. Kharuk et al. [21] analyse post-fire regeneration in larch forests across Siberian permafrost, showing that in northern continuous permafrost zones, fire acts as a natural ecological reset that promotes dense larch recruitment, whereas in southern lowlands, recurrent burning can shift ecosystems toward shrub- or grass-dominated states. Their results demonstrate that periodic fires are a prerequisite for successful larch regeneration and resilience within continuous permafrost, highlighting the importance of climate and substrate conditions in determining whether fire functions as a regenerative process or as a catalyst of degradation. Importantly, the authors argue that it is neither ecologically necessary nor desirable to suppress all fires in these vast larch-dominated landscapes; instead, suppression efforts should be prioritised in areas of high natural, social, or economic value, while allowing most fires in remote permafrost regions to burn under controlled, ecologically appropriate conditions [21]. Complementing this perspective, Baker et al. [22] examine dry forests in western North America and argue that natural disturbances such as wildfire, drought, and insect outbreaks can themselves function as NbSs when they operate within ecologically appropriate regimes. By comparing contemporary disturbance patterns with historical baselines, they show that permitting low- to moderate-severity fires and other natural agents to play their ecological role—while ensuring the protection of nearby communities—enhances structural heterogeneity, reduces fuel accumulation, and strengthens long-term ecosystem resilience [22]. Their findings reframe certain disturbances as potential allies in adapting forests to a warming and drying climate, challenging the assumption that all fire is detrimental and reinforcing the broader shift from fire exclusion toward coexistence with fire.

Other studies highlight the role of modelling tools and optimisation methods in designing and implementing effective NbSs. Pais et al. [23] use the REMAINS simulation model to examine how prescribed burning strategies influence future fire regimes in the ‘Gerês–Xurés’ Transboundary Biosphere Reserve (NW Iberia). Their results show that optimally located burns—particularly along strategic road networks and high-risk zones—can reduce future burned area by up to ~36%, especially when integrated into fire-smart land-use policies. Indeed, the importance of land-use emerges strongly in several contributions. In Portugal, Silva et al. [24] demonstrate that maintaining roughly 40% agricultural land—including crops, pastures, and agroforestry systems—reduces burned area by around 50% compared to landscapes with less than 25% agriculture. Their findings show that multifunctional rural mosaics, by disrupting fuel continuity, represent a powerful NbS for reducing wildfire hazard while sustaining local livelihoods. Turning to operational planning, Shmuel and Heifetz [25] apply a Dijkstra-based optimisation algorithm to design fuel break networks that maximise the reduction in wildfire spread while minimising deforestation in Israel. Their work demonstrates how computational optimisation can enhance the effectiveness and ecological coherence of prevention infrastructures. Further reinforcing the importance of spatial configuration, Rincón et al. [26] provide a territorial diagnosis of wildfire behaviour in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula under multiple weather scenarios. By integrating ignition probability, spread potential, and intensity indices, they identify structurally vulnerable areas where extreme wildfires are likely to occur even under moderate conditions—underscoring the need for preventive NbSs that address fuel continuity and landscape exposure.

The Special Issue also examines trade-offs between ecosystem services, climate regulation, and wildfire risk. Simões et al. [27] analyse carbon–fire interactions across Portuguese landscapes and show that native forests and agroforestry systems provide the most favourable carbon storage–risk balance, whereas plantation-dominated landscapes present high fire hazard despite their carbon potential. Their findings are directly relevant for NbSs aiming to jointly address climate mitigation and fire resilience. From another angle, Petralia and Potosnak [28] investigate particulate matter emissions from prescribed burns in the Chicago metropolitan region, providing rare empirical data from burns conducted near densely populated areas. Although PM concentrations can temporarily exceed health thresholds during the most intense phases of burning, levels rapidly return to baseline. Their results underscore the importance of transparently weighing these short-term air-quality impacts against the long-term benefits of reducing the likelihood and severity of uncontrolled wildfire, whose emissions can be far more damaging. As the wildland–urban interface expands and ecological restoration efforts increase, understanding particulate emissions from prescribed fire becomes essential for informing fire management practices, refining emission reduction strategies, and establishing baselines that can guide future research and help practitioners “fight fire with fire” in a changing climate.

The role of governance and policy frameworks is central to enabling NbSs. Plana et al. [29] conduct a comprehensive review of European Union policies relevant to wildfire management and identify both synergies and major inconsistencies across forestry, climate, biodiversity, and rural development strategies. Their analysis highlights the limited integration of fire’s ecological role into policy design and the need for more coherent, cross-sectoral guidance to implement prevention-oriented, fire-smart approaches. In a similar vein, Veloso et al. [30] surveyed 55 stakeholders in the central–southern regions and conducted a comparative analysis with other Mediterranean countries. Their results highlight that Chile invests significantly less in wildfire prevention (on a USD ha⁻¹ and GDP per capita basis) than comparable fire-prone nations and that key areas such as fuel management, territorial planning, governance structures, and community engagement remain critical for enhancing resilience. Their findings underline that improving institutional capacity, prioritising prevention investment, and strengthening governance innovations are vital to scaling NbSs in these landscapes.

Finally, this Special Issue underscores the importance of community-based and context-sensitive innovations. Schroeder and Ojeda Leal [31] introduce the concept of green/blue initiatives as small-scale, community-driven interventions inspired by ecological processes—such as goat grazing for fuel reduction, restoration-oriented farms, and conservation-based strategies—that can act as stepping stones toward fully fledged NbSs. Their work shows how local culture, social acceptance, and resource limitations shape the feasibility and scalability of NbS, particularly in emerging economies and socio-ecologically complex landscapes.

Together, these contributions demonstrate that the operationalisation of NbSs requires work across ecological, spatial, technological, institutional, and social dimensions. By integrating these perspectives, this Special Issue advances a more holistic understanding of how societies can transition toward fire-resilient, climate-adaptive landscapes.

4. Emerging Insights and Common Patterns

Altogether, the papers in this Special Issue reveal several converging insights that can guide future research and practice:

First, they reaffirm that fire resilience is inherently socio-ecological. Managing wildfire risk cannot rely solely on fuel reduction or suppression capacity—it requires integrating land-use planning, rural development, biodiversity conservation, and community participation. Fire-smart territories emerge where ecological knowledge, adaptive governance, and social learning converge. Second, the studies highlight the importance of spatially explicit approaches—using simulation models, scenario analyses, and spatial optimisation tools—to inform decision-making at landscape to regional scales. These approaches can identify priority areas for prescribed burning, fuel breaks, or land-use change, enhancing both efficiency and ecological coherence. Third, policy coherence and institutional integration remain major challenges. Although the European Green Deal and related frameworks (e.g., Biodiversity Strategy, Forest Strategy) provide opportunities for aligning fire management with NbS principles, their implementation often remains fragmented. Bridging this gap requires fostering collaboration among agencies, aligning incentives, and promoting cross-border cooperation, particularly in transboundary fire-prone regions. Fourth, this issue underscores the relevance of community-based and context-sensitive approaches. In Chile and other regions, locally adapted “green/blue initiatives” illustrate how NbSs can start small, building social acceptance and co-benefits before scaling up. Such approaches are especially relevant in rural landscapes undergoing depopulation, where restoring traditional land-use (e.g., grazing, mosaic farming) can reduce fuel continuity and revitalise local economies. Finally, several contributions call for reframing disturbances themselves as potential allies. Allowing natural processes to operate—within safe boundaries—can foster adaptive capacities in ecosystems and reduce the long-term costs of suppression. This shift from fighting fire to living with fire is central to the NbS paradigm.

5. Pathways Forward

Altogether, the contributions to this Special Issue offer a clear and integrated vision of how Nature-based Solutions can advance wildfire resilience in a rapidly changing climate. While each article focuses on a specific dimension—ecological, spatial, technological, institutional, or community-based—they collectively point toward several strategic priorities for research, policy, and practice:

• The first pathway forward is the need to mainstream preventive, landscape-based strategies within wildfire governance frameworks. NbSs should be recognised as legitimate, evidence-based approaches that enhance ecological resilience while reducing long-term risk. This requires integrating fire ecology into forest, agricultural, biodiversity, and climate policies; aligning incentives across sectors; and ensuring that funding mechanisms support long-term prevention rather than reactive suppression.
• The second priority is to strengthen the science–practice interface, ensuring that advanced diagnostic tools, modelling platforms, and spatial optimisation methods are accessible to land managers and civil protection agencies. Embedding these tools into operational workflows—with appropriate training, data-sharing mechanisms, and institutional collaboration—will help bridge the persistent gap between scientific knowledge and on-the-ground implementation.
• At the same time, there is a pressing need to invest in long-term monitoring and socio-ecological observatories capable of tracking landscape dynamics, fuel structures, biodiversity responses, ecosystem services, and social perceptions. Such monitoring is essential for evaluating NbS performance, detecting unintended consequences, and adapting strategies over time, especially under accelerating climate-driven change.
• The fourth pathway involves recognising and managing trade-offs transparently—for example, between wildfire mitigation, carbon sequestration, and air-quality impacts. Robust NbS design requires clear criteria, monitoring indicators, and interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure that decisions reflect a balanced understanding of multiple benefits and risks.
• Finally, the long-term success of NbS will depend on empowering communities and strengthening local capacities. Grassroots initiatives, traditional land-use practices, and community-led stewardship can serve as anchors for broader NbS strategies, particularly in regions with limited institutional resources or contested land-use regimes. Building trust, supporting local innovation, and promoting co-management arrangements will be essential for socially legitimate and context-sensitive implementation.

In summary, advancing NbSs for extreme wildfires requires coordinated action across science, policy, and society. The combination of ecological principles, spatial planning, technological innovation, governance reform, and community engagement enables the transition toward landscapes that are not only less vulnerable to catastrophic fires but also more resilient, biodiverse, and socially cohesive.

6. Concluding Remarks

The articles in this Special Issue collectively demonstrate that the interface between science, policy, and practice is not a boundary but a fertile space for innovation. By connecting ecological understanding with spatial planning, governance analysis, and community engagement, they illustrate the power of Nature-based Solutions to transform the way societies coexist with fire.

However, much work remains. Achieving coherent, cross-sectoral, and adaptive wildfire governance will require sustained collaboration, institutional reform, and societal commitment. Building fire-resilient landscapes is ultimately a collective endeavour—one that depends on bridging disciplines, sectors, and borders.