In recent years, fire services in Mediterranean Europe have been overwhelmed by extreme wildfire behavior. As a consequence, fire management has moved to defensive strategies with a focus only on the known risks (the fear trap). In this region, wildfires can change rapidly, increasing the uncertainty and causing complex operational scenarios that impact society right from the initial hours. To address this challenge, proactive approaches are an alternative to defensive and reactive strategies. We propose a methodology that integrates the uncertainty of decisions and the cost of each opportunity into the strategic decision-making process. The methodology takes into account values such as fire-fighting safety, organizational resilience, landscape resilience, and social values. Details of the methods and principles used to develop and implement a creative decision-making process that empower the fireline are provided. A tool that segregates the landscape into polygons of fire potential and defines the connectivity between those polygons is used. Two examples of operational implementation of this methodology are presented (2014 Tivissa Fire and 2015 Odena Fire). These methods facilitate the analysis of possible scenarios of resolution and the costs of the opportunities that help build resilient emergency response systems and prevent their collapse. Moreover, they help explain the risk to society and involve citizens in the decision-making process. These methods are based on the experience and lessons learned by European incident commanders, managers, and researchers collected during the last decade.

A growing number of studies argue that forest transition should be enhanced by policymakers given its potential benefits, for instance in slowing climate change through carbon sequestration.Yet the effects of forest transition in landscape and biodiversity remain poorly understood. In this paper we explore the relationships between the forest transition experienced by one Mediterranean mountain area, and the landscape changes occurred therein. Historical land-use maps were built from cadastral cartography (1854; 1956; 2012). Metrics on land-cover change, landscape structure, and landscape functioning were calculated. Multiyear data on butterfly assemblages from two transects was used as indicator of land-use change effects in biodiversity (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012). Results show a forest expansion process in former cereal fields, vineyards and pasturelands along with rural out-migration and land abandonment. Such forest transition involved large changes in landscape structure and functioning. As peasant management of integrated agrosilvopastoral systems disappeared, landscape became less diverse. Even if forest area is now larger than in mid-19 th century, ecological connectivity among forest areas did not substantially improve. Instead, ecological connectivity among open habitats has greatly decreased as cereal fields, vineyards, meadows and pasturelands have almost disappeared.Butterfly assemblages under changing land-uses highlights the importance of agro-forest mosaics for biodiversity conservation in the last decades. Hence the suitability of forest transitions should be critically examined in relation to context and policy objectives. Our work emphasizes that conservation of landscapes with a long history of human use needs to take into account the role of humans in shaping ecological features and biodiversity.

High fireline intensities can trigger fire-atmosphere interaction, producing more extreme and often unexpected fire behavior. These fire-line intensities have been enhanced in recent decades by the increase in fuel load (Di Virgilio et al., 2019;Ruffault et al., 2018;Turco et al., 2018) after changes in landscape management (Pyne, 2019) and by climate change-driven aridity (Abatzoglou et al., 2019). The resulting extreme wildfires are overwhelming fire service operational capacity and becoming a new normal (Jolly et al., 2015), even with reinforced efforts and advanced technologies. The increase in extreme wildfires has had an impact on a global scale, resulting in dramatic consequences in terms of human lives: 173 deaths in Australia in 2009; 110 deaths between June and

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This article summarizes the methodology for the identification of practitioners’ challenges of the H2020 funded project FIRE-IN (Fire and Rescue Innovation Network) activities with a strong focus on the natural hazard mitigation working group and tsunamis in the Mediterranean region as a case study for the 3rd cycle. The scenario of a tsunami occurrence in the Mediterranean is the basis for the FIRE-IN 3rd cycle workshop, as an indicative example of a high impact – low probability event, which aims to identify the Future Common Capability Challenges of practitioners in Europe. The current status of the tsunami hazard in Europe, national and international tsunami risk mitigation measures and procedures and operational experience from recent events are also discussed. Focus is provided on the natural hazard mitigation and tsunami related practitioners’ challenges, while results from the FIRE-IN request for ideas process and the interaction between practitioners, researchers and industry is also discussed. The aim is to present the current and future capability challenges of practitioners, one of the main outcomes of FIRE-IN project, and to provide further guidelines to stakeholders of disaster management towards a safer Europe, mainly, through preparedness for stronger and resilient societies.