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Forest fires: Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)

Endorsed by
DRMKC
Motivation

Wildland–urban and rural–urban interfaces are the spatial manifestation of the coupling of fire and people, and the most proximate scale of exposure and mitigation The abandonment of rural lands and the expansion of urban areas led to the creation of important interfaces between built infrastructures and vegetation with high fuel load that, when burning, create very significant threats to people and make firefighting and other civil protection operations much more difficult to coordinate.

Potential Solutions
Following solutions could be addressing this gap.

Wildland–urban and rural–urban interfaces are the spatial manifestation of the coupling of fire and people, and the most proximate scale of exposure and mitigation The abandonment of rural lands and the expansion of urban areas led to the creation of important interfaces between built infrastructures and vegetation with high fuel load that, when burning, create very significant threats to people and make firefighting and other civil protection operations much more difficult to coordinate.

Limiting the sprawling of WUIs and mitigating the impact of wildfire in these interface areas elicits many social and scientific challenges, such as establishing construction and development standards, defining asset - protection zones with proper fuel management and predicting fire spread and behaviour in interface areas and making this information available to the public for a better response in case of emergency.

Rationale & related CM function(s)

Provide guidance for WUI-specific firefighting and life protection aspects when local communities are exposed to extreme wildfire behavior
Need to assess the effects of improved buffer zone design on mitigating fire impacts on assets
Develop knowledge on wildfire occurrence and behaviour in WUI areas, in particular with respect to land-use fragmentation and climate change
Develop guidance on the use of fire resistant materials for housing construction in the WUI
Provenance
DRKMC gaps explorer: Forest Fires/Wildland-Urban Interface
eu Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Crisis Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.