The wildfires of June 2017 in Portugal prove that the exacerbation of natural disasters due to climate change may be significant in terms of human lives and disruption of essential services. Long term planning of fire prevention, in order to protect citizens and essential services to society, requires the identification of credible future climate threat scenarios for addressing relative extreme situations.
EU-CIRCLE research outcomes can significantly contribute to this through the:
- Provision of long-term assessments of wildfire risk in various European regions, based on the elaboration of IPCC RCP scenarios and regional scale climate models using appropriate fire risk indices;
- identification of regions and time periods within the next decades that may experience increased hydrological risks (drought) and extreme fire behavior;
- assessing the impact of wildfire on the operation of critical infrastructures.
The contribution of EU-CIRCLE is quite important for planning wildfire prevention measures and critical infrastructure resilience, as it provides a platform and methodological framework that can support the long-term assessment of fire risk distribution in an area and support informed decisions for the investment required to mitigate the impact of eventual fires and to aid societies’ adaptation to the new level of risk.