FIRE-RESILIENCE · Protection of Cultural Heritage Against Wildfires in High-Risk Areas

The FIRE-RESILIENT project aims to create an interdisciplinary and innovative model to assess how well Immovable Cultural Heritage (ICH) can withstand wildfires in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas. As cities expand and tourism increases, WUI zones—where urban development meets flammable vegetation—face rising wildfire risks. This project seeks to combine WUI and ICH analyses to improve wildfire risk management and mitigation. With climate change causing more frequent and severe wildfires, this research is timely and relevant, especially for regions like Northern Europe that are newly affected.Led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in collaboration with the Universidade do Porto and the Fire Research and Innovation Centre, the project will develop an Emergency Preparedness and Safety Index (EPSI) to assess ICH. This index will consider protection systems and response capabilities. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to transform qualitative resilience data collected from interviews, EPSI will be integrated into a Geographic Information System that calculates risk based on available hazard maps from the European Forest Fire Information System and the developed index. This will allow for a comprehensive assessment of wildfire risk near WUI zones.The project will test the model on three ICH sites across Europe—the Trøndelag Folk Museum in Trondheim Norway, Alhambra in Granada Spain and the Dolmen of Antela in Oliveira de Frades in Portugal. These sites include both traditionally wildfire-prone areas and those newly impacted by climate change, such as Norway. By quantifying resilience data, this innovative method will offer powerful tools for evaluating and reducing wildfire risks to cultural heritage sites.The results will be freely available to local governments, cultural heritage managers, and researchers, providing a sustainable and advanced approach to managing wildfire risks, protecting cultural heritage, and adapting to climate change.