Wildfire risk modeling

Introduction

Most wildfire risk approaches reflect a broad conceptual framework that includes different but interconnected components, which can also be analyzed separately, such as likelihood, hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and coping capacity. This article presents a concise and nonexhaustive review of the methods and approaches applied to model wildfire risk and its key components

Methodology

Wildfire likelihood and hazard reflect the characteristics of the fire process, responding to specific questions:

• how it starts,
• when it happens,
• where it occurs,
• how it will grow

In the last decade, wildfire modeling has evolved to use advanced machine learning approaches based on algo- rithms that can improve automatically through experi- ence

Different fire simulation systems are available, such as FARSITE, FSim, FlamMap, or Burn-P3 used to estimate fire ignition and spread in different scenarios of fuel and weather conditions, considering potential landscape interventions, such as fuel management or fire suppression.

Exposure

Wildfire exposure evaluates which assets, and to what extent, are located in fire-prone areas. It results from the analysis of fire occurrence, likelihood, or hazard in relation to highly valued resources and assets (HVRAs), using historical fire data or by coupling stochastic and probabilistic wildfire simulations with the spatial distribution of people and assets, such as forests, built-up areas, agricultural lands, or protected areas.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability represents the potential for loss as a result of wildfires. As a measure of potential wildfire im- pacts, it depends on the conditions of the wildfire and on the characteristics of the affected assets

many studies in the past decade emphasized the social component to assess the vulnerability of human communities to wildfires

Coping capacity and response

Lately, particular attention has been given to the implementation of self-protection and mitigation stra- tegies by people exposed to wildfires.

alternative actions and behavior choices that can modify the response capacity to wildfire events have emerged, assessing evacuation, local sheltering, or stay-at-home options

Wildfire risk

Wildfire risk assessment intends to provide an inte- grated view of fire likelihood and consequences

a composite risk index in five categories, which combined burn probability, exposure, and social vulnerability, was applied to the villages of a civil parish