Wildfires in the European Alps are an emerging issue that lead to high damages in protection forests, increasing natural hazards and result in threats for people and high costs up to millions of euros for fire suppression and restoration measures. The recent extremely dry and hot summers in the Alpine space, evidenced the need to be better prepared to face a changing fire regime with more intense and frequent fires. The EUSALP-EU Strategy for the Alpine Region is aiming to improve risk management and adapting governance mechanisms. In this context a panel on forest fires experts in the Alps was established, followed by the design and implementation of a multi-lingual online survey to develop the white paper “Forest fires in the Alps: State of knowledge and future challenges” for an integrated fire management. Scientists, authorities and members of action forces from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Slovenia and Switzerland participated in the survey and workshops to identify major challenges in forest fire prevention, suppression and post-fire management. Success stories on fire management were used to formulate the framework of an integrated fire management for the Alpine region. The white paper contains four recommendations with several actions to put them into effect. They focus on the design and implementation of short- and long-term prevention measures, the adaption of suppression measures to the specific conditions of the Alpine region, improved understanding of measures for post-fire management as well as knowledge transfer and exchange of experiences. This contribution presents the key findings.

The new Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) was launched on 1 September 2022. The AFDRS replaced Australia’s 60 year old rating system with a nationally consistent and up to date method of calculating and communicating fire danger. The AFDRS features: eight fit for purpose fire behaviour models, the first national fuel map for Australia, a consistent fire behaviour index and a simplified four-level rating system based on extensive social research. The AFDRS brings a new level of detail and sophistication to fire danger forecasting.

The technical build of the AFDRS included a new web portal, the Fuel State Editor, the manage fuel data; upgrades to Bureau of Meteorology forecast systems to implement fire behaviour calculations developed the NSW Rural Fire Service on a 1.5km grid; and a new national web site, the Fire Danger Viewer, to view and interrogate fire danger and weather forecasts.

The implementation of the AFDRS required an enormous coordinated effort from all levels of government across all States and Territories as well as the Commonwealth coordinated by AFAC (Australia’s National Council for Fire and Emergency Services). This included developing nationally agreed ways of communicating fire danger, updates to policies and legislation, as well as replacement of physical infrastructure such as signs. Implementation was a significant IT project requiring redesign and upgrades to fire agency web sites and the Bureau of Meteorology public website.

This presentation will outline the history, development and implementation of the Australian Fire Danger Rating System.

We explored the effects of prescribed fires on the diversity of lizards in the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station (SGTES), a large protected area where integrated fire management has been used since 2014. We used pitfall traps with drift fences to survey lizards in unburned and burned areas with time since the last fire (TSLF) ranging from 1 to 5 years. Pitfall traps were opened after the fires and remained active for 15 days. We used GLMs to test for the effect of fire on the abundance and richness of lizards. We did six surveys from 2019 to 2022, following the usual management schedule at the SGTES. We captured 3234 lizards of ten species in pitfall traps, 1883 individuals of eight species in unburned and 1351 individuals of nine species in burned areas. We found no effect of fire or TSLF on lizards richness. Fire had no effect on total abundance, but TSLF had. The abundance of lizards increase at two years of TSLF, but this effect was caused by one species. Tropidurus oreadicus is the most abundant species and shows a higher abundance in habitats with two years of TSFL and decreased in abundance after that. The abundance of lizards without T. oreadicus data shows no effect of TSLF. Our results indicate that prescribed burns do not negatively affect the diversity of lizards in grasslands of central Brazil.

Objectives
The challenges of living with fire require constant adaptation. Governments all over the world have sought to build resilience to natural disasters. The Community First program applies a community-centred approach. Communities have strong incentives to participate in bushfire planning activities, as fire has the potential to affect their properties, health, and livelihoods.

Sharing responsibility for living with fire recognises that fire cannot, nor should it be eliminated from our landscapes. We can build our resilience if agencies, communities and partners work together to achieve systems-level change, in what we do, and how we think.

Methods
The Community First program is a Victorian government program that connects and involves communities in decisions about bushfire management. It is a principles-based, community development approach that places community knowledge, ideas and experiences alongside fire agency planning, research, and expertise. It recognises that fire preparedness requires an ecosystem of stakeholders learning, deciding and adapting together to meet the challenges of living with fire.

Results
Through a facilitated approach, communities and agencies are learning together, building a shared understanding about local areas, making connections, fostering relationships and trust. We are making decisions together about local risks and options for mitigation. This has lead to communities and agencies adapting to the landscape, and each other, activating community strengths, capability and collective resources, to build resilience and adapt to living with fire.

Conclusions
The Community First program is activating a fire risk reduction system built on strong relationships, shared understanding, and community at the heart of everything.

Wildfire risk is likely to increase in the future due to the combined impacts of climate change and urban sprawl. However, quantifying future risk and impact for known and emerging wildfire risk areas is challenging. Such assessment requires integrated frameworks that dynamically consider hazards, values at stake (e.g. built and natural assets, communities, etc.) and how these interact.

For this reason, we used the Unified Natural Hazard Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision Support System (UNHaRMED). This system integrates dynamic land use and building stock models (simulating changes in exposure and vulnerability to wildfires) with a fire behaviour model (modelling the intensity of fire events) to determine spatially distributed risk estimates expressed in terms of average annual loss. We applied UNHaRMED to a case-study area in southwest Western Australia, under plausible future climate and population growth scenarios, to quantify the impact of climate change, population growth and their combined effect on future wildfire risk over a 30-year time horizon.

Results indicate that increases in wildfire risk range between 40% and 60% for climate change and population growth combined. In contrast, population growth alone accounts for 20% to 40% of regional wildfire risk and climate change 10% to 15%.

Simulation results of this form can assist fire and land managers in developing policies that build well-prepared and resilient communities as society moves forward into an uncertain future. Such work could be extended to other regions or support the development of a national-scale decision-support tool quantifying future changes in long-term wildfire risk over decades.

Objectives: We use case examples to demonstrate a recently developed method for describing directional vulnerability to wildfire at community and landscape scales. Implications of these novel new assessments for strategic protection planning are explored.

Methods: A simple metric of landscape fire exposure that was developed for use in Alberta, Canada, and recently validated for use in Portugal, is used to describe viable wildfire trajectories into the built environment. At each assessment point (i.e., any location of value), we delineate 360 possible wildfire trajectories at 1° directional intervals. The length of each directional trajectory segment that intersects lands classified as having high wildfire exposure is then calculated to identify directions that constitute continuous, viable pathways of fire encroachment. A novel radial graph format is used to display results.

Results: Directional vulnerabilities for large inventories of values across entire management areas were generated quickly and easily with a single input (i.e., land cover). Assessed locations exhibited highly unique directional vulnerabilities. Compilations of results across an entire region highlighted wind directions that posed a threat for fire encroachment in the event of an ignition.

Conclusions: Despite the highly directional nature of wildfire threats to public safety, landscape fire risk assessments are typically omnidirectional. Our case examples suggest directional vulnerability assessments can provide valuable insight for strategic planning purposes and could help to inform a wide range of fire management activities including: prioritization of limited fire suppression resources, planning fuel reduction treatments, proactively identifying candidate locations for operational activities, and assessing evacuation vulnerabilities.