Wildfires are becoming a growing threat across Europe, fueled by climate change and changing land use.
In 2023 alone, over 500,000 hectares of land burned in the EU—making it one of the worst years on record.
As fire seasons lengthen and intensify, the need for innovative, coordinated action has never been more urgent.
The Firelogue project is at the forefront of this challenge, bringing together four innovative EU-funded research projects, FirEUrisk FIRE-RES TREEADS and Silvanus. The aim? To support their work to achieve more integrated, improved wildfire prevention, protection and management — and a more resilient Europe.
To learn more, we spoke to Firelogue’s Dr. Claudia Berchtold, Coordinator for Sustainable Transformation and Risk Reduction, Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis.
What are the biggest threats from climate change when it comes to wildfire prevention, response and recovery?
No single factor causes wildfires. They’re caused when certain thresholds are exceeded that cause ignitions, related to vegetation (also known as fuels) or drought. Unusual weather events can lower these thresholds, increasing the probability and spread of wildfires.
Climate change raises the frequency of crossing some thresholds, lengthening the fire season and increasing the number of dry years.
Nonetheless, climate-related factors do not account for the entire complexity of global fire-regime changes, as modified ignition patterns (e.g., human activities) and fuel structures (e.g., land-use changes, fire suppression, drought-related tree dieback, fragmentation) play critical roles.
Which European regions are currently most at risk, and which may become more vulnerable in the future?
Fires are a natural element in Mediterranean ecosystems, many of which are even fire-dependent. However, fires are becoming much more intense in parts of southern Europe, leading to new patterns of fire behaviour which are more difficult to deal with and which, again, could have serious effects on society and the environment unless we take steps to reduce or adapt to these changes. Additionally, regions on the northern edge of historically fire-prone areas (i.e., 40–45°N) have been found to be the most sensitive to a warming climate.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge not only hazard drivers but also aspects of exposure and vulnerability. Exposure describes elements at risk such as houses or infrastructures that may be impacted by wildfires. Consequently, increasing urban sprawl is a driver of risk. Likewise, vulnerability describes the likelihood of a system to suffer harm.
If countries – including their forests, response systems and citizens – are ill-prepared for wildfires, they’re also at higher risk of being impacted by comparatively small fires.
You’ve said that as wildfires become more intense and widespread due to climate change, the European approach must shift from suppression to long-term prevention. How can this shift be achieved?
This is a very good question and, theoretically, the answer is simple as we need to understand that humans and nature are closely connected and that how we shape our landscapes and economies reverts directly back to us in determining the risk we face.
In fact, however, this is a complex process. First of all, the relevant stakeholders need to come together and jointly understand and assess the problem. This means to involve everyone from foresters to farmers, infrastructure operators, land-use planners, civil society organisations, first responders and the insurance industry. We have developed formats to facilitate this exchange.
However, assessing and mapping the risk and understanding the implications of risk reduction measures such as grazing or prescribed burns require frameworks and data, decision support and, sometimes, technological support for implementation. The projects we support have been working on all of that for prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.
Mega-fires don’t respect borders, so what are the challenges of fire prevention, response and restoration at pan-European level?
Currently, wildfire risk reduction measures are mainly dealt with at the national and sub-national levels. This also includes data collection, risk assessment and risk reduction strategies.
However, risk management should be better synchronised at European level in terms of assessment approaches or data used. Also, good practices need to be shared more efficiently, for example, in terms of developing land-use strategies, identifying priority areas for interventions or linking risk reduction with bio-economy strategies. The projects have designed good examples for all of that. Now the insights need to be scaled.
How can we strengthen connections between the different phases of wildfire management, for more integrated and improved prevention, response and recovery across Europe?
Essentially, this requires the collaboration of all stakeholders as indicated at the beginning. However, technologies such as decision support tools may also facilitate this process through the data they require.
For example, information on vegetation and biodiversity is relevant for prevention and recovery aspects and can be collected and used jointly by land-use planners, private businesses, natural parks or environmental agencies, to name just a few. In that sense, technical innovation can also be an enabler of collaboration if implemented accordingly.
Fuel treatments can also be prioritised to benefit suppression efforts, and working with crowd-sourced vegetation information can also enhance citizen awareness.
How do you support policymakers, local communities, businesses and land managers, etc. to implement effective prevention, response and recovery measures?
The projects are all working with a range of local communities and policy makers, so the list of good examples is long. We have collected measures and solutions in our platform: Lessons on Fire – Powered by Firelogue. As a project, we have facilitated the exchange across projects, but what we need is an institutionalised mechanism for knowledge sharing across Europe for all relevant professions.
Together with all our projects, we are launching a proposal for a European Integrated Wildfire Risk Management Strategy that outlines the institutional needs and frameworks that are needed to facilitate knowledge sharing. The aim is to achieve more concerted action across Europe and to exploit the results that have been generated.
How does your approach differ from traditional fire prevention, detection or suppression technologies or methods, and what advantages does this offer for resilience?
The projects we work with have all developed innovative technologies or solutions, taking an integrated approach that brings together prevention, preparedness, response and recovery aspects. They take a holistic view, for example, in terms of creating resilient landscapes and embedding them into bio-economy aspects.
Others have created digital twins that may serve prevention, suppression and restoration efforts. Remote sensing technologies have also been developed and refined using machine learning to enhance available data for all risk management phases to speed up information availability for response operations. These are just a few of many examples.
What other innovative technologies or solutions are they developing?
There are so many that I think it’s helpful to categorise them like this:
Prevention and recovery planning: TREEADS has developed Digital Forest Twins to visualise the impact of actions before embarking on them.
Risk assessment and mapping: FirEUrisk has developed a holistic integrated strategy for assessing the wildfire risk and built geodatasets of all relevant variables for the European territory, including a European fuel map with crown parameters derived from satellite observation. FIRE-RES’ pan-European Fuel Map Server depicts vegetation and other risk characteristic on a European scale, while its Geo Catch App involves citizens to support the process of validating fuel characteristics across European ecosystems
Fire protection: TREEADS’ innovative materials protect infrastructures and residential buildings
Fire adaptation and management: FirEUrisk has developed different climate and socio-economic scenarios to understand future fire regimes in Europe, proposing different adaptation strategies. An AR/VR solution developed by SILVANUS facilitates training for first responders through virtual modelling environments and simulations of real-life situations and wildfires. FirEUrisk has developed a “Handbook with guidelines for fire fighters to face to extreme fires, fires in WUI and fires in high latitudes/altitudes” in different languages.
Insurance and financial incentives: TREEADS and FIRE-RES explore new insurance mechanisms and financial incentives that support different stakeholder groups in reducing wildfire risk. The holistic integrated wildfire risk management assessment strategy developed by FirEUrisk could be used for developing mechanisms and policies for reducing wildfire risk.
Nature-based solutions and resilient landscapes: FIRE-RES has developed the “Fire wine concept” to engage wineries in maintaining fire-resilient territories through a label
Community engagement: SILVANUS and TREEADS developed fire detection and the collection of incident information based on social sensing while FIRE-RES established fire forums. FirEUrisk developed different focus groups in fire-prone areas to better understand citizens’ perception of risk.
Restoration: Silvanus and TREEADS have developed innovative seedling mechanisms using drones.
Looking ahead, what are the key priorities for Firelogue in supporting a more fire-resilient Europe, and how can stakeholders stay engaged with or influence these efforts?
As a Coordination and Support action, our aim is to synthesise the results of our projects and to develop joint policy recommendations. The strategy proposal for Europe that we launched in May 2025 does exactly that. It specifies the research results and depicts the needs from the political and institutional sides to scale and exploit them.
We encourage better collaboration between environmental, agricultural, civil protection, and regional development efforts at European scale.
We’re also advocating for better and ideally binding guidelines for all wildfire risk management phases, the development of targets and their backing with available data, centralised expertise exchange for the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, as well as better knowledge exchange across Europe.
Looking to the future, what’s next?
We really hope that the joint strategy proposal representing 70M € in research funding and a big share of the European Wildfire Risk community will be heard. Our projects are ending soon, but they have so much potential for Europe if they can be institutionalised — specifically in times where traditional allies might not be a fall-back option.
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