South Eastern Mediterranean Excellence Development in FIre REsearch (SEMEDFIRE)

No longer a rare occurrence, extreme fires during summer months are not only frequent but also more intense and longer lasting. In Europe, most fires occur in southern countries characterised by a Mediterranean climate. What’s more, the combination of droughts and heatwaves has made prevention and firefighting difficult. This makes research concerning fire safety and management essential for the Southern and Eastern (SE) Mediterranean region. 

South Eastern Mediterranean Excellence Development In Fire Research (SEMEDFIRE), a twining project under the Horizon Europe call: HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03, increase the capacities EUC in R&I and research-management-administration in fire science. The project will promote networking activities with top-class counterparts at the EU level and will generate knowledge and capacities for the SE Mediterranean including the Middle East.

The high-level aim of the SEMEDFIRE project is to establish a regional centre for the advancement of disaster prevention and management with a focus on wildfires. During SEMEDFIRE, EUC will be given the opportunity to develop excellent research capacities in critical sectors of wildfire disaster prevention and management, and at the same time it will further develop its research capacity on the innovation and administration levels. It is hence scoped to raise the profile and reputation of EUC to such a level of ERA-excellence that it will be able to become a lighthouse of spreading fire-science excellence in Cyprus and the SE Mediterranean, as well as to nurture a culture of societal fire safety.

Role of Wageningen University and Research

➡ Within the larger SEMEDFIRE project, WUR is responsible for Work Package 4 (WP4) on Integrated Fire Management (IFM). WUR aims to share its IFM expertise with project partner The Centre-of-Excellence in Risk and Decision Science (CERIDES) of the European University Cyprus (EUC). This knowledge initiative will include staff exchanges between the two universities, with institutions taking turns to host each other for two weeks in the Netherlands and Cyprus. The aim of the visits will be to provide hands-on experience and data on how to use pyrogeography and IFM to move from fire resistance to fire resilience: living with fire .    

➡ WUR will also lead two short courses for all SEMEDFIRE participants. In the first course, WUR will present to the consortium members, as well as to targeted Governmental and Regional actors, effective ways of selecting, developing, assessing and using IFM concepts.  The second course, entitled 'Stakeholder Participation: linking Social Science and Environmental Sciences', will entail WUR organizing stakeholder workshops to identify the needs of diverse stakeholder groups and develop a joint research agenda to strengthen collaborations between science and practice.  

In these workshops we will also identify how knowledge exchange can be enhanced between traditionally fire prone regions and emerging fire regions (linking North and South Europe), and how fire can learn from other risks like water, building on the PyroLife approach.