Wildfire Resilient Cultural Heritage

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Wildland fire is a socio-natural process embodying a complex duality for human societies. Humans use fire to modify their landscape, clear land for agriculture and development, and replenish soil nutrients. At the same time, fire's destructive power endangers livelihoods, traditions and landscapes. Anthropogenic climate change disrupts the wildfire-human relationship, directly through its influence on the natural environment and indirectly by impacting on societal structures and behaviours, threatening tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Addressing the growing challenges posed by climate-driven fire regime change on tangible and intangible cultural heritage requires building systematic and place-based understanding of the wildfire-culture relationship to underpin policies promoting heritage resilience to wildfire threats.In this context, FIRECULT will: (1) document and explore the role of fire regime characteristics in the development of local cultures, heritage and landscapes; (2) characterize the risk of fire regime change to lifeways, landscapes and landmarks; (3) quantify the direct and indirect costs to cultural heritage resulting from changing wildfire frequency, intensity and extent; (4) assess the sustainability of traditional fire management and identify best practices; (5) develop strategies for wildfire resilient heritage governance; and (6) facilitate transdisciplinary and cross-regional knowledge exchange for heritage conservation across currently and soon-to-be fire prone regions. FIRECULT will examine the climate-wildfire-heritage nexus at the global and local scales. Global modelling activities are designed to assess the cross-border, biome-level effects of climate-induced wildfire regime change on heritage, assessing the risk of fire to ways of life, landscapes, and landmarks. Local analyses take place in four case study sites of heritage-rich landscapes in Ireland, Kenya, Turkey, and Italy, purposefully selected to represent a range of biomes, levels of current and projected fire risk, and traditions of land use management.