Different Strategies for Resilience to Wildfires: The Experience of Collective Land Ownership in Galicia (Northwest Spain)

Abstract

Resilience is not a particularly novel concept, but it has recently become frequently used as a measurement indicator of adaptation capacity under different approaches depending on the field of study. Ideally, for example, forest ecosystems would be resilient to wildfires, one of the most serious types of perturbation they are subjected to. In areas such as the northwest of Spain, a region with one of the most severe records of wildfire occurrence in western Europe, resilience indicators should be related with changes in land planning aimed to minimize the effects of forest fires. This article aimed to analyze the fire resilience strategies of a selected group of forest communities in northwest Spain. More specifically, the perceived risk of wildfires was compared with the actual record of fire events in these communities and the presence or absence of adaptive changes in management practices to reduce risk and improve recovery capacity. A mixed quantitative–qualitative approach was used to gather information about good practices, innovative solutions, and major obstacles for forest fire resilience in Galician common lands. The results suggest that while there is no single form of successful management, a key characteristic of resilient communities is the integration of fire as a management tool.

Collaborative agroforestry to mitigate wildfires in Extremadura, Spain: land manager motivations and perceptions of outcomes, benefits, and policy needs

“…All land managers agreed with policy to “create a special land management regime for areas with high fire risk.” This would help land managers to better assess wildfire risk in their area and identify areas where management is needed. It could also provide a basis for territorial planning processes (Marey-Perez et al 2021 ). “Decreasing bureaucratic requirements” was strongly supported by respondents.…”

FIRELAN—An Ecologically Based Planning Model towards a Fire Resilient and Sustainable Landscape. A Case Study in Center Region of Portugal

“…The concept of resilience is the capacity of systems to reorganize and recover from change and disturbance without changing to other states [27][28][29]. This concept linked with the comprehension of the landscape as a system [30] leads to the definition of landscape fire resilience as the capacity of landscape in absorbing the disturbance caused by rural fires without losing its function, structure and identity and ultimately weakening fire frequency and intensity or magnitude.…”

Landscape Planning Integrated Approaches to Support Post-Wildfire Restoration in Natural Protected Areas: The Vesuvius National Park Case Study

“…Although aspects connected with modelling or assessment of fire risk and vulnerability, principally devoted to forest types, have been extensively investigated [40,41], their implementation into a general conceptual framework, considering all the social, economic and environmental components, is quite recent [30,31,42] and needs to be implemented and validated. The awareness that landscape management, starting from land-use/cover changes, has direct implications on fire risk [43], not only in terms of land composition (e.g., the abandonment of agricultural lands or afforestation activities), but also in terms of configuration (creation of new interface areas between urban and natural/agricultural ones), leads resource managers to consider a new approach for fire management, extended to landscape planning [44], as introduced by the concept of adaptive and transformative resilience [28,45,46]. Within the categories of adaptive re-silience, the present work focuses attention on the social perspective (landscape planning), rather than on an ecological perspective (specific interventions on ecosystems and natural habitats burned).…”