NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites enabled, for the first time, systematic production of high quality, multi-year, global 1 km active fire and 500-m burned area maps using observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The 20-year NASA MODIS fire product record is the only science quality, reprocessed record of global fire activity, and plays a fundamental role in understanding the spatiotemporal drivers of fire activity and for emissions estimation and the relationship between climate and fire.
This presentation will focus on:
- The current state of the MODIS active fire and burned area products, and on the planned transition to the VIIRS instrument in order to provide the first ever global fire record covering the 30-year period conventionally required for climate analysis
- The use of the MODIS fire products to support national to continental level fire assessment and reporting, with particular regards to the tools developed available in the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS).
We will illustrate the use of documented, transparent and reproducible methods for the derivation of summary statistics for supporting analysts and policy makers for the analysis of historical data, for the detection of anomalies in timing and intensity of the fire season, and for compiling summary reports and emission inventories.

Understanding wildfire impacts on structures in wildland urban interface (WUI) communities is fundamental for emergency response and mitigation planning to reduce potential social and economic losses. The magnitude of structures loss determines the direct economic costs for re-building, indirect economic losses due to evacuation and disruption of economic activities as well as shelter needs. Here we will present a framework for the development and implementation of wildfire impact assessment of WUI residential structures for both deterministic incident-level and probabilistic community or regional scale analysis. The framework is made of the following successive components: hazard, inventory, exposure, and impact. The hazard model generates spatial and temporal distribution of fire intensity for wildfire event scenarios; the inventory model provides spatial pattern of exposed structures; the exposure model estimates the fire intensity at WUI locations; and the impact model evaluates the structures loss. This last component is done by applying newly developed empirical response functions represented as the relationship between fire intensity, distance from forest edge, resulting in expected proportion of burned structures. Risk analyses using this framework are synthesized into a number of impact indicators that will be showcased through two case studies using both deterministic and probabilistic based approaches.

The intensified weather events recorded on a global basis have been correlated with the so-called “climate crisis”; prolonged droughts, extremely high temperatures and heat waves usually result in destructive wildfires and huge quantities of smoke that may cross the borders with the respective impacts on the exposed populations.
Objectives:
1.To tackle the importance of inclusive community engagement in disaster preparedness and response for reducing vulnerabilities according to the Sendai Framework goals, focusing on wildfires and the generated smoke.
2. To highlight the significance of running tabletop exercises or simulated drills with groups that may be considered vulnerable in disasters, like people with disabilities, or children for standardization of procedures.
Methods:
Best practices and lessons learned on how locally-led action with inclusive criteria may strengthen communities’ disaster resilience upon emerging risks in reference to international experiences, are gathered and presented here; experiences based on the research prepared so far by the European Center for Forest Fires of the EUR-OPA Major Hazards Agreement, will also be shared.
Results: Community-level disaster risk management could be proved a critical element for the training of communities at risk to cope with emergencies, leaving no one behind; possible synergisms and interconnections among the key players will be discussed.
Conclusions:
Empowerment of a people-centred approach and active involvement of citizens with no discrimination in disaster preparedness and response activities may reinforce communities’ resilience in a more sustainable manner; the combination of a bottom-up with a top-down approach could be considered in disaster risk governance.

Objective: To describe the evolution of accident reviews within the USDA Forest Service.

Methods: A case study in how an organization went from focusing on the pointy end operator in the aftermath of an accident, to focusing on a systems approach with an emphasis on organizational learning as a means of preventing accidents.

Results: The Forest Service went from blaming pointy end operators as a means of preventing accidents to focusing on the system of work to prevent accidents. This entailed setting the stage for those who were present during an accident to tell their accounts of what happened so that the organizational leadership could suss out the conditions and pressures present at the time of the accident. Once the organization has a better understanding of the conditions of the accident, they are better positioned to make up-stream changes to the system of work so that the people on the ground are better supported by the agency. This then grew into a metareview effort that took into account 10 years worth of accidents that focused on relieving pressure up-stream in the organizational system of work. This metareview captures themes to focus on into the future to set the stage for a better organizational accident record moving forward.

Conclusions: Changing the nature of accident reviews in this way profoundly increased the trust within the ranks of the organization. The result was a reporting and learning culture within the Forest Service as a whole.

Objective

The objective is to develop a model for a relative assessment of territorial vulnerabilities to wildfire, to support local responsible in land management decision making. The aim is to compare the global vulnerability of local territories in order to prioritize correction actions on the most critical situations.

Methods

In order to assess territorial vulnerabilities, we used the multicriteria formalism and method. The formalism requires to organize the territorial stakes in a sematic hierarchy, ie. in classes and subclasses. A relative weigh is assigned to each stake classes and subclasses at the same level of a hierarchy. The weigh represents the importance of the stake class relatively to the others. Weight are assessed using analytical hierarchy processes applied to expert opinions individual judgments. Specific metrics were developed in order to properly take into account both the number of objects (class instances) and the dimension (size) of each object. The method was applied to the Baronnies Provençales Natural Regional Park.

Results

Results show a high variability of vulnerability level even on neighboring communes, due to high variations of stakes population of each classes. The specific vulnerability indexes allow to identify hot spot of vulnerability, mainly related to the person's related criteria (inhabitants, touristic accommodation sites, health infrastructures, etc.

Conclusion

Application of a multicriteria approach for territorial vulnerability assessment provide useful diagnosis in order for decision makers to anticipate the previewed future expansion. Some methodological questions, notably related to the quantification of the stakes dimension and population have still to be deepen.

The effects of land cover changes, compounded by the severe droughts of 2005 and 2010, pushed the Amazon Basin towards outstanding fire seasons. The record-breaking drought of 2015, exacerbated by El Niño, raised concerns about a fire season of unprecedented severity. However, using reliable remote sensing data, we show that fire activity in 2015 remained weak, at 54% and 44% of the levels attained in 2005 and 2010, and 25% below the average of the preceding 13 years. This contrast was enhanced when analyzing the energy released by persistent fires associated with deforestation activities, together with their spatial distribution. A principal component analysis yielded spatio-temporal patterns emphasizing that fire activity is higher, and the drought-fire relationship is stronger, when and where deforestation occurs. We then demonstrated that the overall decrease in deforestation rate was key to prevent the outbreak of biomass burning, despite the adverse meteorological conditions triggered by the outstanding drought of 2015. By dismissing the recently suggested decoupling between deforestation and fire activity driven by 21st century droughts, our results clearly show that the Amazon sensitivity to on-going shifts in anthropogenic pressure cannot be disregarded. The Amazon forest – still the largest tropical rainforest in the world – again is experiencing increasingly uncontrolled land occupation by agribusiness and mining interests, leading to increased deforestation rates. Therefore, ongoing undermining of environmental regulations and increased drought frequency projected by climate models are likely to bring large scale fire-disruption upon the Amazon ecosystem.

A growing body of research explores how fire behavior and related environmental conditions affect evacuation decision-making during wildfires. Understanding how fire behavior and human behavior interact can help improve evacuation models, develop more effective emergency communication, and support the design of evacuation plans that better reflect local social and ecological contexts, among other benefits. The objective of our research is to better characterize the role that extreme fire behavior plays in wildland-urban interface evacuation. To better understand the fire behavior-human behavior nexus, we conducted 35 interviews with 47 individuals affected by the East Troublesome Fire that burned in Grand County, Colorado USA during October 2020. This fire exhibited extreme behavior, which made it ideal for investigating how considerations such as wind speed and direction, smoke and broader air quality concerns, and the fire’s rate of spread, affected the timing and execution of decision-making related to evacuation. During the interviews, we introduced a series of 3D visualizations of the fire’s behavior and related weather conditions for October 21-22nd, the period when fire behavior and related social impacts from the fire were most intense. Visualizations were developed from fire and weather model data in partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. We will present a timeline of the fire’s behavior paired with common behaviors that were triggered by each notable environmental cue. We conclude with recommendations for incorporating social responses to fire behavior into community hazard planning for risk reduction.