Firefighters’ leadership and well-being in rural fires: study in virtual reality environments

Abstract

In Mediterranean regions worldwide, climate and landscape change increased the occurrence and the risk of (very) large and intense fires, which override the current firefighting capacity. Fire management policies, largely focused on fighting at the expense of prevention, have proven inadequate to address this challenge. Agricultural abandonment has shaped rural mountain areas in many parts of Southern Europe since the last century, owing to diverse socio-economic and biophysical constraints such as reduced job opportunities, poor generational renewal, low accessibility and soil productivity. The cessation of traditional livestock and agricultural practices caused by rural exodus has favoured more homogeneous and flammable landscapes —with strong side-effects on fire regime, ecosystem services and biodiversity. In fact, the challenge for managers and policy makers is no longer simply how to reduce wildfire impacts but how to reconcile socio-economic impacts of fires with their ecological benefits. Fire-smart management would clearly enable a more balanced integration of positive (reducing species competition, diseases and pests or fire intensity, and increase fire protection in wildland-urban interfaces) and negative contributions of fire to human well-being, which would inform better decision making in fire management policy and land-use planning. In practice, fire-smart landscapes can be obtained by fuel-reduction treatments and by fuel type conversion, rather than by fuel isolation. From this perspective, proactive management should therefore focus on reshaping vegetation (fuel) configuration to foster more fire-resistant and/or fire-resilient landscapes while simultaneously ensuring the long-term supply of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. In contrast, rewilding has been proposed as an opportunity for biodiversity conservation in abandoned landscapes. However, rewilding is challenged by the increasing fire risk associated with more flammable landscapes, and the loss of open-habitat specialist species. Here we present three complementary studies carried out in the frame of the FirESmart project (https://firesmartproject.wordpress.com) focusing on two contrasting land-use policy scenarios (Rewilding vs High Nature Value farmlands) based on stakeholders’ perception of fire-landscape dynamics, and their potential impacts on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Our studies were implemented in a transboundary protected area, the Gerês-Xurés Biosphere Reserve, where we predicted the potential impacts in terms of fire regime change, species conservation and carbon sequestration. Our studies contribute to the increasing evidence of agricultural policies as essential tools to ensure biodiversity while reducing fire hazard, an aspect that has been frequently neglected when assessing the beneficial effects of agricultural policies. Also, our findings suggest using fire to enhance rewilding as an alternative management strategy in our study area — an issue that decision makers and managers should consider when implementing rewilding initiatives in other fire-prone regions. These studies represent the needs of local communities in these mountainous areas, which are heavily affected by rural abandonment, fire regimes, and loss of natural resources. These rural communities try to keep alive the few and scarce agricultural activities and manage the mountain landscapes. However, the reduced investment and financial support of these isolated communities has led to the decline of these traditional fuel and habitat management tools.