DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORKSHOP: DAY 1

On the first day, welcome words were pronounced by Dr Gaetano Benedetto, on behalf of Dr. Maurizio Ciaperoni, Director of the Circeo National Park and host of the event. This was followed by introduction words from Dr Franco Cozza, Head of the Policy Service, Corpo Forestale dello Stato, who also presented the Italian Corpo Forestale.

Mr José Antonio Prado, Director, FAO Forest Management Division, emphasized the importance of fire prevention in fire management and Mr Jésus San Miguel, from the EC Joint Research Centre in Ispra, stressed the importance of cooperation between the organizers of the event for the benefit of fire management in the Mediterranean Region.

Session 1 - Major Activities in Fire Management of Relevance to the Mediterranean

This session was chaired by Mr José Antonio Prado.

Mr Alfredo Milazzo, Head of the Fire Fighting Division, Corpo Forestale dello Stato, explained the state of fire management in Italy, the different Italian risk regions, the development of fires and burned areas over the last 30 years and the organizational model of fire fighting through the example of Liguria, including national, regional and local responsibilities.

Mr Ricardo Vélez, Chair of the Silva Mediterranea Working Group on Forest Fire, reminded the audience about the specific recommendations approved during the 4^th Conference on Wildland Fire Management, held in 2007 in Sevilla, Spain. He considered them as an essential basis for the Workshop. He specifically mentioned the recommendations which were developed in Session C, regarding Europe, Southeast Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and Caucasus. These recommendations appear in Annex 3, and the report of the full session can be consulted on the following website: http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de/sevilla-2007/Session-C-Europe-Report-en.pdf.

Mr Pieter van Lierop, Forestry Officer responsible for FAO‘s activities in Fire Management, described FAO’s actual activities and challenges in Fire Management. FAO’s main roles were to facilitate the development and implementation of global and regional strategies, to produce and facilitate global access to fire management data, information and terminology and to build capacity at national and regional levels. The FAO-coordinated Fire Management Voluntary Guidelines, and the Fire Management Actions Alliance - a global partnership with a Secretariat at FAO - are important tools and mechanisms to strengthen capacity in fire management. All activities under these roles include a participatory and an integrated approach.

The discussion in this session dealt mostly with the importance of prevention, the need to define better the efficiency of prevention, which indicators to use for this effect as well as the relation between climate change and fires. Regarding the last point, it was observed that although the fire risks in the Mediterranean most likely will rise through climate change, the main origin and underlying causes of fire will remain the same: most fires will still be caused by human.

Session 2 - Legislation and Information in the Mediterranean

This Session was chaired by Mr Pieter van Lierop (FAO), and consisted of three presentations. One of them, presented by Mr Michael Bucki from the European Commission, had to be postponed to the next day but will be briefly discussed here.

Two presentations – one by Ms. Cristina Montiel, responsible for a FIREPARADOX research component on national policy instruments, with reference to wildfire suppression or prescribed burning, and one by Ms Maja Dittel (FAO), on legal issues regarding fire management from the Balkan and Northern Africa - showed interesting progress in defining recommendations for fire management legal frameworks. FIRE PARADOX will base its recommendations mostly on European lessons learned and the FAO survey will use case studies from the entire world. Ms Dittel focused her presentation on lessons learned from countries in North Africa and the Balkan.

“Fire in the Mediterranean is an unavoidable cultural and ecological phenomenon, but an avoidable catastrophe” (Montiel)

For the Mediterranean Region, Ms. Montiel gave also an interesting SWOT analysis of Wildfire legislation and policy for the Mediterranean region based on her survey.

SWOT analysis of wildfire legislation and policy for the Mediterranean region (Montiel)

Strengths & opportunities:

All the countries have specific policies for wildland fires Development of information systems Political will on coordination Improvement of the extinction efficiency

Weaknesses & threats:

Suppression-oriented actions at the expense of prevention Need to enhanced community-based cooperation Traditional burning practices were made illegal without prior educational programmes Lack of a cross-sectoral approach

Ms Maja Dittel emphasized the involvement of local communities in fire management and the counter-productivity of overly restrictive fire use. She recommended to use a participatory approach for Fire Management legislation development with the following benefits.

Benefits of a participatory approach for the development of fire management legislation (Dittel):

to ensure that legal solutions are practical and realistic to ensure that the law is easy to understand to build capacity among stakeholders to understand and use the law and exercise their rights to make decisions in an integrated and inter-disciplinary manner

Mr. Michael Bucki made a presentation on the EU framework on forest fire prevention. His presentation showed how five General Directions, plus the Joint Research Centre, are involved in Fire Management in the European Commission and emphasized that prevention should be the most important job, given the dramatic human aspects of disastrous fires and the high cost of disaster relief.

Discussion and comments in this session were related to needed regulations on urban interface fires, the fear to use backfires or prescribed burning as a consequence of a lack of training in these practices and biomass energy production as a measure to reduce fire risks.

“Prevention should be the most important job, given the dramatic human aspects of disastrous fires and the high cost of disaster relief” (Bucki)