Funded under the European H2020 program, the SAFERS (Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies) project is dedicated to managing the entire forest fire emergency cycle. Specifically, the project aims to implement an Emergency Management System (EMS) that collects data from various sources for use in prevention, response, and post-event assessments.
With a duration of three years (October 2020 – March 2024), SAFERS will address the problems related to forest fires, whose severity and frequency seem to be exacerbated by climate change. To improve and support the management of these events and therefore, also to contribute to the resilience of communities, the project aims to integrate data from different sources. In fact, data from satellites and global Earth observation systems (GEOSS) will be used, as well as crowdsourced data from social media and specific applications, usable by both operators and citizens, in addition to information from ground-based sensors.
These data will be processed to provide support to the different phases of the emergency management. In the preventive phase it will allow to create risk maps and alerts; in the response phase it will be used to assess the extent and propagation of the fire in progress and, finally, in the post-event phase it will allow both to estimate the economic losses and to monitor the recovery of the ground covered by the fire.
Within the project, CIMA Research Foundation will provide the expertise developed on RISICO and PROPAGATOR models and, it will be dedicated to the demonstration phase, coordinating the field validation of the SAFERS system in four pilot areas, so far identified in Italy (Piedmont), France (Corsica), Spain and Greece.
