Dr. Christine Eriksen

Wildfires pose an urgent yet unsolved social problem in Europe with more people living at-risk than ever before. This is due to a four-decade increase in the frequency, scale, and intensity of wildfires in southern, central, and northern Europe alike. Communities therefore need to be better prepared to act in an informed manner, and this requires a scaling up of social solutions. Since August 2023, Dr. Christine Eriksen has led FiRES – a five-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to study wildfires resilience among at-risk communities in Europe. After an initial two years at University of Bern, the project is now hosted by ETH Zürich.

FiRES uses a comparative case study design to investigate the diverse social geographies of wildfire across rural, regional, and urban-interface sites in Europe. It engages residents, land managers, and fire practitioners to advance knowledge of social vulnerability and coping capacity.

FiRES aims to answer two key questions:

1. What factors make people able and willing to prepare for wildfires?
2. What factors enable people to survive and recover physically and mentally from catastrophic wildfires?

This will be achieved through three objectives:

1. Description: a systematic, comparative and comprehensive empirical study of how social vulnerability and coping capacity are tended to and modified through human-wildfire interactions across European fire-knowledge regions.
2. Understanding and theorization: produce thick descriptions of lived experiences of wildfires through in-depth narrative interviews and case study research.
3. Collaboration and application: assist with the building of wildfire resilient communities by assessing factors that enable people to prepare, survive, and recover from wildfire across temporal and spatial scales, and through the collaborative development of a wildfire preparedness enhancement methodology.

FiRES seeks to address two critical problems:

1. The apparent disconnect in Europe between the fiery reality of climate change, the inability to control catastrophic wildfires, and the need for ‘individual wildfire preparedness’, reveals both a fundamental lack of public awareness of what makes wildfires deadly and how to mitigate these risks, and a problematic reliance on technocratic (technical, top-down) approaches to civil protection. These issues are exacerbated by climate change and shifts in land use. It renders people unnecessarily vulnerable.
2. The strong focus on quantitative vulnerability measures and economic cost calculations, which tend to dominate assessments of climate-related hazards in Europe, omits the important intangible costs wildfires inflict on everyday functionality, phys­ical and mental health, and the long-term damage to cultural heritage and ecosystems. This problem stresses how a lack of societal awareness of wildfire’s manifold impacts can undermine short- and long-term coping capacity.

FiRES investigates social dimensions of wildfire in countries that range from fire-prone Mediterranean Europe, and the Alps, to the growing risk of wildfire in northern Europe. This geographical span encompasses three fire-knowledge regions with two case study countries in each region:

• Wildfire-prone countries that have experienced catastrophic wildfires with significant losses (Catalonia/Spain, Attica/Greece).
• Wildfire-known countries that have experienced catastrophic wildfires, without recent mass casualties (Italy, Cyprus).
• Wildfire-expected countries where wildfire is a growing challenge (Switzerland, United Kingdom).

An Advisory Board consisting of members with valuable experience of research grants, knowledge co-creation and practical outputs provides constructive feedback to the FiRES project on a regular basis:

• Dr. Gareth Clay, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester, England.
• Dr. Núria Prat-Guitart, Knowledge and Applied Science Manager, Pau Costa Foundation, Catalonia, Spain.
• Dr. Tim Prior, Head of Department (Civil Protection) / Chief of Staff (Cantonal Crisis Organisation), Canton Bern, Switzerland.