Landscape management in the Wildland-Urban Interface to reduce future wildfire vulnerability for communities. What are the barriers to change?

Climate change studies for northern Europe point to an increased number of days with high wildfire danger in the near future.

Wildfires have the last decades already severely challenged Swedish civil protection by damaging the built environment, its human values, assets, as well as ecosystem services, and a future increase of structure loss will likely follow a prolonged fire season.

An emerging strategy for wildfire mitigation is to protect the built environment with strategical landscape management in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI).

Specifically, tree canopies dominated by deciduous species seem to have a multi-functional damping effect on fire intensity and spread.

Simultaneously, changes in landscapes affects its residents’ wellbeing through their place attachment and recreational use of the landscape.

The aim of this project is to formulate, through a socio-environmental framework, how integrated landscape management in the WUI can reduce communities’ vulnerability to wildfire.

Organizational, social, and biophysical perspectives of deciduous tree inclusion, management of open land and landscape planning are integrated to elucidate how local level management takes place, how tree species selection and other measures reduce vulnerability of properties, and how changes in landscape management affect residents and users of the WUI.

We use this knowledge to identify the barriers for adaptation and to identify communication needs and channels to facilitate implementation.