Sparking FireSmart Policies in the EU: The Importance of an Integrated Fire Management Approach - Nicolas Faivre, Policy Officer, DG Research and Innovation (RTD), European Commission, Belgium

The presentation will introduce the recent EU policy developments relating to wildfire risk management in line with the new EU Green Deal and how the Research & Innovation agenda serves these priorities will be addressed, including recent grants as well as opportunities for international cooperation on wildfire research.

Wildfire Management Paradigms in Africa: A SWOT Analysis - Esther Amoako, Lecturer,  Department of Ecotourism and Environmental Management, University for Development Studies, Ghana and PhD student, Rhodes University South Africa

Fire is an important tool, widely used in most rural livelihood activities as well as conservation sites in Africa. With the projected increasing incidence in the frequency and size of fires along with hotter and drier seasons, what are the prospects of fire management in Africa?

Indigenous Fire Regimes and Their Ecosystem Services in Desert Australia - Rebecca Bird, Professor of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, USA

People and their livelihoods with long histories of embeddedness in their ecosystems may provide substantial ecosystem services through traditional subsistence activities. In this talk, I draw on our long term ecological and ethnographic work with Martu communities in the Western Desert of Australia to show how indigenous cultural landscapes buffer against climate-driven increases in fire size, provide more habitat for native animal species, and increase plant diversity. The resulting ecosystem services that could be provided through encouraging traditional land use practices vastly outweigh the current operating costs of supporting these remote communities.

Fire Ecology as Guideline for Assessing Post-fire Risks - Marco Conedera, Research Unit Leader, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Switzerland

In mountain regions, forest fires represent an increased risk for natural hazards such as rock fall, shallow landslides, and debris flows. Knowledge on the post-fire stand dynamics are a prerequisite for assessing the temporal evolution of such risks.