Wildfire Management in Increasing Complex Socio-Ecological Environments: Needs and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

The escalating adverse wildfire effects across the world and the costs of suppression highlight that the current answers to the wildfire problem are clearly insufficient or inadequate.

In an increasingly complex fire environment (e.g., climate change, ecosystem degradation, expanding human development, forestry change, increasing fuel load, urban sprawl, landscape homogenization, rural depopulation), there is a broad consensus that traditional fire management practices, over-emphasising suppression, are leading to undesirable outcomes and are unsustainable, and therefore must be changed. Extreme wildfire events as in Southern Europe in 2017–2018, and in California, Brazil and Australia in 2019 emphasize the urgent need for this shift and ask for the contribution and collaboration of both science and policy to make this change possible.

On the other hand, the complex relationships between wildfire risk management and public policies are a frontier of knowledge to be explored. The recognition of the different stakeholders and the need to find the right scales of analysis and intervention offer a challenging field of analysis.

Scientific knowledge is an essential and integral part of wildfire management systems but it represents only one of many inputs to policy making and by itself is unable to make the above mentioned change happen, as science and policy operate in different domains with competing interests.

This Special Issue is looking for cross-cultural and multidisciplinairy contributions that shed light on the wildfire science–policy interface to facilitate the necessary changes in wildfire management leading to better outcomes, for both humans and the environment.

Dr. Fantina Tedim
Prof. Dr. Vittorio Leone
Prof. Dr. Carmen Vázquez-Varela
Guest Editors

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