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Abstract
We estimate the country-level risk of extreme wildfires defined by burned area (BA) for Mediterranean Europe and carry out a cross-country comparison. To this end, we avail of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) geospatial data from 2006 to 2019 to perform an extreme value analysis. More specifically, we apply a point process characterization of wildfire extremes using maximum likelihood estimation. By modeling covariates, we also evaluate potential trends and correlations with commonly known factors that drive or affect wildfire occurrence, such as the Fire Weather Index as a proxy for meteorological conditions, population density, land cover type, and seasonality. We find that the highest risk of extreme wildfires is in Portugal (PT), followed by Greece (GR), Spain (ES), and Italy (IT) with a 10-year BA return level of 50'338 ha, 33'242 ha, 25'165 ha, and 8'966 ha, respectively. Coupling our results with existing estimates of the monetary impact of large wildfires suggests expected losses of 162–439 million € (PT), 81–219 million € (ES), 41–290 million € (GR), and 18–78 million € (IT) for such 10-year return period events.
SUMMARY: We model the risk of extreme wildfires for Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain in form of burned area return levels, compare them, and estimate expected losses.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1745-1762 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Risk Analysis |
Volume | 43 |
Issue number | 9 |
Early online date | 12 Dec 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Grant Agreement Innovative Training Networks (ITN) No. 860787.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Risk Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Risk Analysis.
Keywords
- environmental economics
- environmental hazards
- extreme value statistics
- risk analysis
- wildfires
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
- Physiology (medical)
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PyroLife - training the next generation of integrated fire management experts
1/10/19 → 31/12/24
Project: EU