Not My Responsibility! - Improved Wildfire Preparedness through Cross-Sectoral Dialogue

Future climate is expected to prolong wildfire seasons in Sweden and increase the occurrence of severe dry spells.

This will increase society’s vulnerability against wildfires which in turn requires climate change adaptation strategies among the public, home-owners, municipalities as well as land owners.

What these climate adaptation strategies are, how they will be implemented and or who’s responsibility it is to maintain them is not clear. In this project, we seek to add all subcomponents that together affects the risk and vulnerability against wildfires.

We also seek to gather different actors from different sectors having different interests to form a cross-sectoral dialogue enabling a common understanding och knowledge base to assess vulnerability and determine responsibility between the different actors.

The project aims to form a holistic description of vulnerability that is quantifiable and transferable from spatial and temporal variables.

Using this as a basis, the distribution of responsibility and roles of actors can be described and processed in the cross-sectoral dialogue.

The project will also start a programme for fire safe communities where educational material for climate adaptation on a local (homes and settlements), regional (land managers) and national perspectives will be provided.

The project will also, in addition to preparedness, contribute with knowledge for guidance of suppression activities in the wildland-urban interface