Spreading like a Wildfire: The Importance of Education and Outreach in Fire Management

In many parts of the world, fire is a key and natural disturbance on the landscape. However, they can have devastating environmental and economic consequences when they burn into urban interfaces, and when they burn at intensities and frequencies outside the adaptive capacity of native flora and fauna. In the modern era, vestiges of colonial fire management paradigms based on emergency response and fire suppression, and now coupled with the effects of climate change, have resulted in fires burning at unprecedented frequencies, sizes, and intensities, damaging ecosystems, livelihoods, and human populations. These effects highlight the need for a new fire management paradigm - one that integrates not just response and suppression, but also relevant sociocultural and environmental aspects.

Here, I present a range of outreach activities I have delivered across a range of audiences at science festivals in Europe and the UK, informed in part by findings from a survey carried out through the FIRE-ADAPT consortium, an EU funded project studying Integrated Fire Management (IFM). In the survey, participants were asked what they considered the most important actions for effective fire management. The most prevalent response was Public Outreach and Participation, highlighting the importance of targeting educational outreach, science communication, and public engagement in the development of fire management policy. The outreach activities I present here address two of the key messages respondents highlighted: 1) that fire is a natural, inevitable, and important part of fire-adapted landscapes, and 2) humans are a part of that landscape, and dispelling the nature-culture divide is essential for taking ownership of their participation in landscape management. I will discuss my motivations for engaging in these outreach activities, and how I see the key messages fit into broader fire management policies.