Understanding Stakeholder Discourses for improved Wildfire Risk Management

Wildfire risk management has gained importance as wildfires increase in their frequency and intensity, with potentially devastating impacts on communities and ecosystems, contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss and ultimately increasing societal vulnerability to multi-hazards. As a result of historical processes influenced by socioeconomic factors, political decisions and changes in human-nature interactions, wildfire risk management has become more complex involving multiple stakeholders often holding competing views. Different views exist, for example, concerning the respective roles of fire suppression, which employs ever more sophisticated technologies, and fire prevention involving land use planning, fuel treatments and Nature-based Solutions. Perceptions of the problem and the potential solutions vary among different stakeholders, which can result in conflicts impeding effective wildfire risk management. Thus, a multifaceted stakeholder approach is needed to address the wildfire challenge.

We conducted a qualitative analysis of stakeholder discourses on wildfire risk management, especially in the Mediterranean context. The analysis focuses on narratives of how experts frame the wildfire risk problem, the potential solutions and interventions they propose for its management, and their corresponding views on Nature-based Solutions. It is mainly based on data collected from two cross-sectoral wildfire workshops and expert interviews, as part of the Horizon 2020 project Firelogue (Cross-sector dialogue for Wildfire Risk Management). The stakeholders and workshop participants come from five relevant working groups within the wildfire risk management community, namely, civil protection, environment, infrastructure, insurance and society. Reports and notes from the workshops, as well as transcripts from the semi-structured interviews were coded manually with the qualitative data analysis software ‘NVivo’ to identify a plurality of views.

The dual role of fire as a natural element and integral part of ecosystems with regenerative functions on the one hand, and as a destructive disturbance to socio-ecological systems on the other, further contributes to the complexity of the nexus between fire, nature and people. Increased land abandonment, forest protection and restoration projects emerged with growing support for allowing forests to be shaped more naturally. Special attention is placed on Nature-based Solutions in the context of wildfires. We classified the expert discourses along the three axiological categories of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF): 1) the instrumental values of nature to society (Nature for Society); 2) the intrinsic values of nature (Nature for Nature) and 3) the relational values weaving human-nature relationships together (Nature as Culture). The discourses differ from each other in the regard of whether impacts and benefits are being foremost quantified and considered in trade-offs, ways to restore natural ecosystems to be self-reinforcing and self-balancing, and how to establish a reciprocal relationship seeing nature and society as interconnected entities.

Understanding the social constructions, worldviews and values of the wildfire community, analyzed and documented with qualitative methods, can help identify compromise solutions and a robust policy space. In this way, this study aims to facilitate a holistic understanding of complex wildfire risks with an interdisciplinary approach and contribute to improving decision-making processes across diverse sectors and scales.