138 - Getting ready for the Wildfires in Northern Europe with Nieves Fernandez-Anez

Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. In this podcast, I'm not only trying to give you the best and freshest information from the world of fire science, but I'm also trying to actively find topics that could influence how us fire engineers work in five, 10 years, what challenges we need to learn to respond to, what the future is going to bring to us, and one of such topics that is kind of obvious is how wildfires are stepping into our nice cool modern world, especially in places in the world where you would not have them that much. In this episode I'm thinking mostly about Northern Europe, scandinavia, but Poland to some extent as well, and I've invited my guest, dr Nivas Fernandez from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Norway, and I thought it's going to be an easy episode. You know I'm going to ask Nivas how bad is the climate change? She's going to tell me it's getting hotter. I'll respond that yeah, this means more wildfires. She'll agree. Then we will continue commenting on how bigger summers or warmer summers cause more threats, and then we're going to quickly discuss how we can implement solutions from the Southern Europe to Norway. Boom, we have a great episode of the podcast, and boy I love to be naive in this show. I love to be completely wrong, because that these are the moments where I learned the most from the interviews I got. This is not so simple. This is truly a tremendous challenge in how countries with different cultures, with different backgrounds, with different resources, with different vegetations, climates, topology, different population density, different transportation networks, will respond to a threat that is most likely coming their ways if they like it or not. And yes, we can learn a lot from our friends and colleagues who have been battling wildfires for hundreds of years in their history. But boy, it's not easy to transpose that knowledge. And in this episode we're covering about the challenges that are involved with just that. And I hope you will also discover something interesting to you that perhaps was not that obvious when you thought about the growing wildfire hazard in climates that have not encountered them previously. So I guess that's it for the introduction. Let's spin the intro and let's hear what Neves has to say about transferring knowledge from South North. Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Vojci Wimczynski and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and now employing more than a hundred professionals. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions. In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals. Who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures this year, get in touch at OFRConsultantscom. Hello everybody, welcome to the Firesize Show. I'm here today with Neves Fernandez-Annes. Hello Neves, hi Mojci.

Wimczynski, thanks for the invitation.

Yeah, thanks for standing with me. We had some technical issues, but we're on a good track to record an amazing podcast episode. Neves is a Spanish scientist who's now working at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Norway, so that must be tough for a Spanish person. How's the sunshine in Norway?

We don't know what this is.

Well, I hope that this in the summer you will get a sufficient dose of sunshine, but today we're not going to talk about the climate, or well, we're going to talk about the climate a little bit. I've invited you to discuss the things related to wildfires and how the global issue of wildfires we can all call it a global issue how does it shift northways? In your career you've been dealing a lot with biomass. You've been dealing with some clever cellular automata, but you were also heavily involved in this cost action filings where you were looking into the European landscape of wildland fires. And now I thought it's going to be really interesting to discuss how the situation is looking for the north in Europe Plays where we probably have not had a series of wildfire hazards. I would consider Poland north enough to have the same view of the world. It has not been. We had wildfires, but it has not been like a wildfire season like you see in California or south in Europe, and every year it seems it's getting worse. So tell me how it doesn't look in north in Europe from your point of view.

Yeah, well, we haven't seen a lot of things until now or until the last years. This is something that we face all the time. We don't have fires in the north, we don't have this kind of fire. Well, I can say we don't have more than 30 degrees inside the Arctic Circle, and this was true until what? Four, five years ago? And now we are placing all these changes. Everything is changing and the thing is that we don't know how it is changing and we don't know what we are facing for the coming years. So we are seeing that the danger is increased in the countries which had wildfires since always, let's say. The situation is worsening and it is coming up. There are more fires coming to the north and we need to be prepared. So the whole idea is that we know, or we believe that this is going to happen. We have to be prepared before it happens.

Is it something that's measurable? I can feel the climate is shifting in Poland. I remember the winters in my childhood and I struggle to find snow nowadays for my children.

I don't think that it is that easy, because we have some expectations, we have some predictions every summer. The summer in 2022 was expected to be the hottest and recorded, and it was. The summer in 2023 was expected to be the hottest recorded, and it was, but this didn't happen in a Scandinavia. In the Scandinavia, they were not the hottest recorded and they were actually mild. This is a very general statement, because in Scandinavia, the things we thought from the coast to inland, but there are a lot of things that need to be taken into account, which is that we are not having our fire. Seasons are not happening in summer, they are happening in winter and in January. So how is climate change affecting us? But not in the expected way. So it is very difficult to say what is going to come.

There's not like a direct shift that we have warmers, summer you have worse firewater. It's more about the dryness of the season and the amount of precipitation you have, the amount of water the plants accumulate. That's how I understood it.

Yeah, and it is very complicated because the numbers can be read in very different ways, because we are not having a decrease in precipitation 20,. We are having more precipitation in Norway than in previous years, but they come in certain periods. So we have a lot of precipitation for some time and then it stops and then we have dry periods, which is what we are not used. But if you look at the numbers of precipitation per month or something like this, it doesn't show up, so it is very difficult to find out what is happening.

And how does this influence the vegetation itself? Are there observable changes in the patterns, how the vegetation develops? I don't know. You have more bushes, more tree growth.

We have a lot of bushes in the West Coast where I live, and they are bigger right Because of the rain. Something that I find interesting also and I didn't know because I'm a Spanish person living in Norway is that now what is happening here, for example, is that it is snowing more than before, or at least down in the previous years, and snow is not good for wildfires because it kind of dries their vegetation. You have the vegetation covered with snow for a week or two weeks, or whatever happens, and then, when the snow is removed, what you have is dry vegetation is brown. So if, after this, you have a dry period, then it is very dangerous and this is not something that they would have thought. They would have thought, like it is snowing after this, everything is going to be very wet, everything is going to be full of water, and this is not what happened.

This is very interesting because I would naively think as well that if you have like more precipitation in terms of so centimeters, that's good, because that's literally water, but it seems that it's also about how much water can the plants take. When you were working in the Firelink's network, I assume you have had the chance to work with people from all across Europe. How did you discuss these patterns and where the observations similar across Europe from your point of view and your colleagues?

So, also just as information, I'm also in a new cost action that is a starting now. In extreme winds, fires and this is one of the things that everybody is speaking about and that we as a community need to figure out how are we going to compare things? It's not the same Fire in Norway are small for many people. What is extreme wildfire and how are we going to handle this? Because I cannot say that we don't have a problem just because our fires are smaller. It's just that the scale that we are looking at is other than the previous research and the main research that we have. So part of this, how I see it, is that we need to translate things. There is a lot of knowledge. There are great researchers out there that have been working for many years in their particular locations, in their particular situations. Now, how much of this is useful for me, how much of this I can take and implement as it is, and how much I need to translate and how can I translate it? Because the problem that we have and this is what we are working as a general topic is that the models that we have now and the knowledge that we have now is not working for us. The models are not working, they are not predicting and they are not giving us the information that we need.

Can you try and define extreme wildfire? When is an average wildfire, when is it an extreme, and do you only worry about the extreme ones?

So the term extreme came because this new cost action is focused on extreme wildfires and this was the conversation that we were having yesterday and this is something that we need to address. There are some options out there, there are literatures speaking out of this, but the fact that they see that extreme should not be defined as a size. For example, we shouldn't say, ok, if you have 500 hectares, then it is extreme wildfire, because maybe a small wildfire is affecting more people, more vegetation, essential infrastructure, as somebody mentioned yesterday in the meeting. What if this wildfire is affecting a specific life that we need to take into account To speak about animals and vegetation? If this extreme wildfire, so maybe we should look for a definition that says that extreme wildfire, what we cover as extreme wildfire means that it is affecting something that is important, or maybe it is on how firefighters can handle this.

If we try to protect against the extreme ones, I guess we are protecting against all of them, or most of them, because we don't want them to grow into extreme wildfires In the previous cost action. In the summary, you have said that we have lack of consistent and detailed records of wildlandfire events across Europe, and that was one of the first findings that you got when you entered this pan-European study. I wonder how is the situation changing and improving and how those records are created so we get better knowledge of the wildfire hazard across Europe.

Yeah, that's a difficult question actually, but what I have observed, or what we have observed, is that the countries that are managing the problems for many years like Portugal, spain, greece are better on that, and the countries from the north, they, have a lack of information. In our case, for example, in Norway, we have a database that is available online or by request, and they have introduced some changes in 2023 in the questionnaire that firefighters have to fill after events, for example. So there is a change there and there is some improvement, and it is very difficult to pinpoint what is the information that we really need, because, if you ask me as a researcher, the information that is useful for me is not exactly the same that is useful for a firefighter to prevent this or to protect against these events in the future, and it is time consuming to get all the data right.

So, I'm asking this question with a particular interest because when you have data, you can build the models based on that data to cater for those particular events. And you have just a minute ago mentioned that models we have. They do not actually respond to the needs, for example, for Norway, where you are now today. So I wondered, like where the models are today and is there a good chance that we can actually improve that? But let's try and do modeling. So perhaps you could shortly tell me how does one model wildfire events for preparedness stage or in general to learn about the wildfire patterns, and perhaps then tell me why you think they would not be working that well in your local context.

So at the end of what we are trying to do is once fire models that can help during the event, right, like if you have a fire and can I know where it is going to spread, how it is going to spread and the spread of wildfires. They can on many fires, but the main ones are always a wind, topography and vegetation.

Right.

This is a very brief way of speaking about this, but we are always speaking about these three things topography, climate and vegetation. So topography and climate is more or less the same, like you just gather the data right. Like my climate is my climate. But then what happens with the vegetation? The vegetation even when, for example, we have a lot of Kaluna vulgaris, a lot of heather in Norway, the fire behavior that my heather has is not the same than the one that they have in Scotland or the one that they have in the south of the UK, because the vegetation evolves and vegetation changes depending on how the previous seasons have been. So this is what I think that should be implemented and this is what we are doing we are trying to understand the fire behavior of our own vegetation, sitting in the lab and burning stuff to see how the fire spread is and how it is going to advance and how we can handle that.

What are the differences? Is it like difference in mass to volume ratios, different amount of moisture content in the plants, different chemicals inside the plant? I know some plants would have aromatic oils that would make them more fire-prone than others. What are you looking at when you're comparing plants to the ones that exist in known models?

Yeah, I'm not an expert on composition and this is one of the things that we want to look at, which is taking plants from different places and just put them in a TGA and in a corn and seed. These plants have gone through different cycles of fire and rising again and fire rising again. They are going to be less prone to ignite again. You get stronger when you go through this. If you don't have a good management, your plants are going to be bigger, are going to be more dense, are going to be like. There are a lot of differences that you can have there and this is not something speaking about the last few years where we are speaking about an evolution, since we have had the plants right In Norway. Historically, we have always done in this part of the country. We have always done a lot of control fires, prescribed fires in Heather, because everybody has always known that it was very vulnerable and very irritable. So we have cycles all the time and every year the farmers, the firefighters and a lot of volunteers know where they have to run.

It's really interesting because it's not even a different type of plant. It's not just this you have this one species that is extremely dangerous and you just remove it and you're good. It's more about the life cycle of the plants, the ecosystem itself, how it reacts, how it recovers from the fire, how it grows and accumulates in a way that's different, right.

Yeah, I guess that we should never say just remove it, I can't enjoy it. It's made it to right. Like. This is also something that we spoke about in fire links, because fire links was not only in the mirrors, doing fire behavior, which is how I have felt in my life. I guess there were a lot of ecologies, there was a lot of soil scientists, a lot of people that is not only taking how the fire is, and they were speaking about all this. Like fire is also something that is in nature. We need it and we need it to evolve and we need it to clean and we need all this and the plants need it. But we also have to look at it from the side of the plants, right, like we, as humans, need the vegetation and need all this in place and we need to be careful with it too.

I'm very worried about, like, if the fire engineers response to wildfires is to cut down all the trees, then it's not a great response and I wouldn't feel that we have succeeded in our job to help others and that's also something I am very championing for the communication and understanding the other stakeholders in the process and understanding that we, as fire engineers, are not there to evangelize and tell others how to live. We're to listen carefully what their issue is and tell them what's the most fire safe response to that issue, while maintaining what they need, and I think that's what successful fire engineering is. Can you tell me more about this collaboration in five links? So what were the parties involved and what voices have you had there? You said ecologies.

Yeah, a lot of people. It was great. There was a lot of people in there. There were five working groups and the leader was Artemis Erda from the University of Valencia. He's a scientist that has been working on vineyards and some other stuff for a long time and for me it was good because, as I said, I think that what we need in the north is communication and is collaboration. So it was great to go to places and just sit down with people and say, look, we're having this problem. How did you deal with this when it was your problem? What can we do? And because there is this sentence that everybody that has been in a field for some time tells you when you start, which is, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. And it's true and I agree. The problem that I see is that the wheel has not been tested in all the roles. Right, we have to be careful. I don't need to reinvent the wheel and I am very respectful with the work that has been done before me, but I also need to check what parts of the wheel work for me and which part I need to build new again. And this is what, finally, was a bit for me checking and testing and speaking and discussing.

Have you found any specific practices that would be present in the south that could be really useful after adaptation for the northern climate? You've already mentioned that in your region the recent practice of controlled fires to control and limit the fuel, and I would say the same practice was present in Poland sometimes ago, Mainly driven by agriculture, I would say, rather than fire management, but I remember from my childhood those things happen. So perhaps other solutions like what were you able to learn and transpose into the northern system.

I think that, in more than activities like this, it was more on how to deal with the issues. So, for example, I remember that I didn't know a lot about scribe fires, so I'm more used to the way of doing it. In Norway, I have been seeing videos and they do it. And then somebody from Spain saw a video that they had on scribe fires and they were commenting I was going to say last, but maybe better commenting on the fact that they blow the fire with a leaf blower, which is something that they thought that it was not. You can never do something like this because it is really dangerous. Like just go to a fire and just blow it, and this is how I do it in here. I'm not sure of what is good and what is bad. It's just like sit down, comment on this and check, because this is our way of doing things, because we have always done it like this, but isn't the best. And operationally for wildfires, we have so much to learn from the south. We don't have resources, we don't have firefighter trucks, we don't have special ones. We don't have all these are things that we need to improve, and what I have seen before in many other situations is that normally governments what they do is that they have a very bad event, a very bad moment, and then they spend a ton of money on something, but they don't really think if it is good or if it is not good. They just freak out. The population freaks out. So we are just going to have put a lot of millions from this to say that we have fixed it. But what if, before we have this event, we can actually analyze what is what we are going to need? We have a list, we know it and then when the millions come, then we come at some point. We don't have to buy things without thinking we just have the list already and this is something that the south can help us with. What is what they will say? That we need to fight wildfire.

You previously mentioned, with the models that you have the landscape, the terrain, or the climate, the vegetation. Now, the terrain, I mean, to some extent it may be similar it's mountains, valleys, coastline, et cetera but the way how human encampments are built in those locations, I think there must be a lot of differences, at least to my limited understanding of how Scandinavia looks, which is limited to places where fire science is practiced in Scandinavia. I'm not sure if that's representative for the whole part of the Europe that we're talking about, but they definitely look different than Spain or Portugal, where you would have those villages everywhere, at least in the locations which I know. So how does that make your job in taking the solutions from the south to the north different? Because you most likely cannot have the exact same mitigation strategies. You cannot have the same amount and scatter of the fire departments, for example.

Yes, so let's start by discussing that. I'm going to focus in Norway now. In Norway, the situation is completely different. Not only speaking about wildfires, but speaking about everything. Speaking about cities, everything is completely different and we have very different areas. If we stick about the west, which is where I live, the west is where the fjords are. Everybody knows about this and it goes everywhere. When I moved here, somebody told me in Haaguesund, which is where I live, you don't have to worry about the weather, because it is always eight degrees and raining. It's not exactly like this and things are changing a lot, but it is very constant. I mean, you have summer, you have winter, but not very tough Winter, and summers are also normally rainy and not very hot, while if you go to inland, to all slow, to all this part, you have very tough winters. The other day when I landed in Oslo, it was minus 19 degrees, but the summers are great for tourism. I'm going to say not great for wildfires. They are worn. They are not Spanish summers, but they are worn. The big cities are Oslo, which is inland, or by the coast, where we are. There are also big cities, but we are speaking about big cities, that Oslo, which is the capital of Norway, has, I think that it is 600,000 inhabitants and it's the biggest city in the country. We are five million people, so it's not comparable with many things. And then if you go to the north, it's a completely different story because there is a small population, a small city, very dispersed. The population density is completely different. So if we start to speak in our the wild and urban interface, it is going to be a completely different story, and their way of living is this and I don't have to make them change because of this. I have to adjust my solutions to their lifestyle. And you have these cabins in the middle of nowhere because they really like this lifestyle of going to the middle of the mountain. However, we're going to protect this. It's something that is really complicated because it's not an issue that we see In Spain. It's not that normal to just say, hey, I'm going to the cabin and I live in the middle of nowhere, so it is very different and it is going to be difficult to translate. This is why I mean by when the model don't really work is that all these things are not there, but where this discussion is going, I see, like two different problems emerging.

One would be the fires getting closer to the dense populations and then during large cities like Oslo, where you would be surrounded by nature and you have a dense human population that is suddenly at the risk that they have not been before because they didn't have these fires. But they also see another risk with those extreme fires in remote areas, where you would have very limited access for any kind of prevention or response measures and basically the fire could grow to whatever size it can grow to and because of how the things are changing, because of the longer dry seasons, because of the shifts in vegetation patterns and growth patterns, it could simply have enough fuel to build larger and larger fires and you would not have big chance to actually respond to this. I wonder, like are you trying to prevent both? Are you focused on just the wild land urban interface? Where are the needs focused on?

I guess that I am in this moment of my career where I want to say I'm going to do everything, but I guess that it is not possible Right now. I'm focusing on the basis of everything. I'm focusing on the vegetation, I'm focusing on characterizing vegetation. I would like to end up. I have a national project now on this, on the spread of wildfires on vegetation, and my main goal is to also have a complete view of what the needs are, because we don't even know that. We are focusing on trying to give tools that can work, and then we will see how to adjust these tools.

Are you working on any sort of tools that would help you quantify, for example, the consequences of the fire, to define which fires are worse, which perhaps are most cost-effective to fight? Perhaps a small fire in Oslo is actually creating bigger economical or societal consequences than a large fire in a remote area. I don't know that, but there's a chance. Are we also building tools like that that help us predict where our actions are, let's say, most influential, the best?

Not now, but it should be included in the adi. Yes, so one of the first things that we detected is that we need better definition of Norway and the risk that we have, meaning that we need a map from ourselves saying where the danger is right, Depending on our specific type of vegetation, depending on our specific situation. Something that I have seen, for example and this was something that I didn't expect is that the national vegetation map yes, and that is called from the civil defense direct parade Only consider trees. It doesn't have the bushes in the map, For example, so that area covered by vegetation in Norway in this map is much less than what it really is. So if I go to check, if I have something that is on a barn, it may not be in that map. I think that they are changing it and improving it now, but this is how it is now. So these are things that need to be changed.

So in the Fire Links report you've also written that there's increasing frequency and damage of those fires. As fire engineers I was not really trained well to manage fires coming from outside and then during the buildings that I was designing. To what extent this landscape is shifting, to what extent fire safety engineers should be aware and knowledgeable about wildfires coming into the image? I assume that in southern countries where the wildfires have been, you know the part of the culture, even you know an obvious thing, that there's a fire season. As they happen, I assume you would have a different understanding, different focus in your fire safety engineering of your common buildings, you know residential developments, factories, whatever you're building up. Now, with this threat becoming more prevalent in the northern parts, is this knowledge like more obvious? Is it more obvious that fire engineers should be aware of that and, if so, are the actions to actually spread the knowledge to them besides the podcast episode?

Yeah, I mean, we have to take that into account, and it is going to require some time to make people think on the fact that the fire is not only dangerous if it is inside, like it can come from the outside, and how we are going to do that, and I feel that it can be easier in some countries and more difficult in others. So I don't know how you are going to come to a person here and you're going to tell them that they need to have a 500 meter space around their house or something like this, without vegetation. This is not going to be culturally acceptable here, for example. So maybe we need to look at new solutions and maybe we need to try to adjust these solutions to where we are, or maybe everybody has to just accept it and do it, but it is going to require a lot of time to make this happen.

I wonder if this is an area where we could really transpose the solutions and the best practices from other parts of the world into our parts of the world, because I'm very sure that we have very basic regulations that tell you the distance from the edge of the forest and that pretty much is it. As a funny part, we often treat the edge of the forest as an industrial building for many purposes of the fire regulations, so that's kind of interesting. But I've never heard about the concept of defensible space, for example in our local part, where you would design the surroundings of your building. I'm very positive that in the future it would. How does it look from your perspective as someone working within those groups?

So let me put it like this you have your head in Norwegian, you have to call it hita your cabin in the middle of the mountains, because this is what you like, this is what you have learned your entire life. Is this contact with nature or all this? And now somebody comes to you and tells you that you cannot make this. You have to cut all the vegetation that you have around. You are going to react against it, but okay, I imagine that we have a catastrophe, we have a big fire, and then they understand. The second question that I see here is who is going to take care of that? This management is time consuming, is resources consuming. Who is going to take care of this? The owner of the properties, or is it going to be the government, or what do I have? Do I have to spend all the time that I had free now dealing with this and cleaning around my house? I'm not saying that I support this way of thinking and, yes, this is a concern that is around. You are trying to change the culture that they have, that they have been rising and that they believe in, and, apart from that, you are asking them because the government is not going to clean everything. It's going to be it's one of us. It's going to have to clean around, so I'm going to have to use all my personal resources on doing this when I don't even believe on this, because people don't even believe on this. And Norwegian society is normally very respectful and they follow rules. We have a campfire ban, for example, during the summer. So the reality is there, but there is also a basic respect level that you cannot make people change what they are. So I'm going to ask them to change everything that they have believed in and everything that they have raised them and how they want to raise the kids and how they want to grow up, and everything with something that they don't perceive as a risk. And this is the problem that they don't perceive that this is going to be a risk.

This is again comes back to transposing the knowledge, because you have communities that are very well aware that this is a risk, that can give you very clear examples of how big the risk is. Of course, you cannot justify measures in Norway by showing the pictures of I don't know wineyards in southern Spain burning. You have to transpose that message so it is understood by the local community and how it relates to them particularly.

Listen, we are speaking about this on the Norwegian perspective. So, on one hand, I have all these people that seem like this and they don't perceive it, and then, on the other hand, I was in this Christmas and I went to Cáceres, sierra de Gata. Sierra de Gata is a place that has had a lot of wildfires along the history and they had one I think that it was a couple of years ago which was devastating, and we were in a very small village and we were speaking with the owner of the bar, the owner of the fire and everything, and he said look, yes, civil defense and the police came here to tell us that we had to evacuate the village because of the fire, but there is no weather. I know that the village is not going to burn because it has happened before and I'm not going to move from my house. Yes, because these people come to me and tell me to move. I stayed here and I was right in the fire with a bunch of water, just water there, because I don't think that you have to go, because I am used to wildfires and it is a completely different story. And how these people come get to the same point. It is very complicated. These people that has been suffering wildfires since always this month was speaking as if this were something that he had done several times in his life. And now I'm going to try to translate all this to somebody that has probably never even felt the fear of a wildfire. And it is like this because I grew up in Spain. I haven't been near by a wildfire, but it is something that has been in my life always. I grew up knowing what I could do, what I could do seeing the fires in the TV every summer, every summer, maybe not in a scientific way, but it was there. And here we don't speak about it. It is something that doesn't happen.

This is very interesting because you cannot really transplant the culture. As you said, it is not just the knowledge, it is the experience, it is the history, it is how the experience is passed from generation to generation. This is very interesting. I agree this is going to be a challenge. And it is not only a challenge at the personal level, like what a single person can do to protect their own home, what the local community can do to protect the village. It is at the government responsibility level. If the politicians have never been exposed to that, they can either underreact, overreact. How does they know what is the adequate response to the changing hazard? And just as the plans cannot evolve quick enough to adapt to the new shifts in the climate, to the new seasons, to new hazards, in the same way the culture, the politics, the whole societal ecosystem cannot adapt quick enough to this change. In the wildfires this is something perhaps even harder than assessing the differences in moisture and in the vegetation itself. How do you manage this at this cultural scale?

What I am aiming to is to be able to have facts to prove it somehow. If we are able to prove it in the lab, if we are able to show it to the people somehow, then maybe they can start thinking like we do. And right now is what I told you things are not happening. So people don't know that the fire is hot until they are nearby a fire, and it is a community that are very aware of wildfires. We have wooden houses everywhere and they burn. I have seen several houses here and how it was on to the ground because of a fire, and they're very careful with this and they have restrictions with this and they have everything, but just because I have seen it right, like my neighbor's house burns, for example, and this is when they react. So what I really expected and let me phrase it in a correctly political way is that when these fires happened in 2018 in Sweden the big, horrible fires that were there I thought that this was going to be a change, because, I mean, it is not your neighbor's house, but it's the neighbor's somehow and that this was going to be a change, even more than in the government, which, I guess and until we are losing resources is not going to change. I hope that it was going to be a change in the people. If this happens in Sweden, which is the custom that they were ever, you call them, it can't happen here, but it didn't. They still don't see it as clear as I thought that it was going to happen.

And the last thing that I wanted to talk with you. Perhaps this is less related to Norway itself, but, in general, the theme of fires. Moving to the north, there is completely a new set of ecosystems now more prone to fires. I'm thinking about the tundra areas, I'm thinking about the boreal petlands that are now exposed to wildfire risk more than in the past. I wonder if we, as fire engineers, or even as a societies, can we catch up with that, because the amount of new hazards, in my view, is so much bigger than the increase in resources that we have in the management. How do you view this shifting risk in the next decade or two and, based on your connections through the cost actions, how is the scientists community aware and responding to this shift?

I don't have an answer. I hope, or what I see, in a way, is that it is very difficult, because when you start to speak about soil, we start to speak about a different problem. I mean, it's fire jet, but then what we're speaking about is modeling. We're speaking about a different kind of combustion phenomenon that behaves in a different way that a modern combustion has been less research than flames, in a very general term, is less known. There has been very big efforts from fire safety engineers in the last years since I started that imperial in 2016. And they were already working in modern deep, but there have been several very good researchers and they are doing large-scale experiments and they are doing so. It is the research is going on. I think that it gets much less attraction than what it should. People doesn't seem to feel that it is as dangerous as it is, or this is my feeling at least. You know smaller, it is slower, yes, but in the since this, some fires started in the north, north, north. I think that this has been a good point for people to understand that this is happening. The thing is that we have a very big task on a smoldering of soil itself, and we have a really big task on the interaction between wildfires and smoldering fires in soil, which is something, and transitions from smoldering to flaming and from flaming to smoldering and deal with this. I don't think that is something that we're going to see or feel that it is solved in 10 years.

I'm asking because, you know, just seeing the direction where things are heading, it doesn't take much to expect that this will be an increasing threat. I rather expect this to be an increasing threat rather than expect this to not be a threat in five years on its own. You know, I see the trends, I see changing and again, like what you've mentioned, the research done at Imperial that was the first podcast episode, actually, of the Fire Science Show where I discussed this with Guillermo his research on Indonesia and again, I think, as a set of experiments, a set of experiences from very deep south or near equator that perhaps will be more and more relevant for the north. Again, a challenge in how to transpose this knowledge that was gathered somewhere and then apply it for a completely different ecosystem, to rain, weather and vegetation. Again, something you said, we should not reinvent it from the scratch. We should take an, adapt and adjust, because we simply don't have time to reinvent it. That's why I've voted in here and, knowing that you're among the leaders that lead this change and this transfer of knowledge, I'm happy that these are things that you are currently working on. I'm thinking about how to actually put them into place before we have those major, tragic fires that will most likely come one day.

I mean to be honest. Let me just tell you how I said, in mind how different the situation is between us modern and flaming that currently we don't even have extinguishing systems for us modern fires. We don't know how to do it. We don't have water extinguishing, we don't know how to do it. So how are we going to find it if we don't even have this?

I've heard about experiments. I hope I'm correct, but I think they had a torrential rain during one of the experiments in Indonesia and that even did not put out the fire. So if a torrential rain doesn't, then that's not great. Nivas, we need more knowledge. We need to share knowledge we have. So perhaps for the end we can direct people to some resource basis. Are there any resources from the fire links or from the New York Coast action that people could refer to if they would like to be more informed about these overall challenges in how fires spread across Europe and differences between the countries? Where could we direct people to?

We have the fire links on our website where we were uploading everything. We had a long paper with like 90 authors or something like this, explaining the situation in Europe, which I would recommend and, to be honest, my main recommendation, now that we are starting this new course and everything that is going on, is for people to reach cost actions, to reach other people. We are not going to be able to fight all that is coming without collaboration and without communication, and something that I have learned in their last years is that there is a lot of people willing to help, willing to speak, willing to mentor, willing to follow up. So reach people, speak with people and share what you know, because if not, we are not going to win.

This cost action is open now. Can people join, at least as observers?

Yes, the extreme wildfires is cost action, as you have started. My board group had the kickoff yesterday, so we are on the way. Because working on extreme wildfires are interested, we will just apply their website in the cost action where you can just kick member, join as member, or something like this, and we will get your information.

Given the opportunity, can I ask you a personal question, Because there's a lot of young researchers listening to this podcast and people often wonder to what extent participation in the community is interesting, beneficial. What's your statement? I know you've been a part of the cost before. Now you're entering another cost action. How do you view those actions from a perspective of a young scientist? Would you recommend joining such an action?

I think it is a great place for networking and for meeting people, but, being very honest, as a research researcher, I think that it depends a lot on the situation that you have in your workplace. My situation is that my university encourages us to do this kind of thing, so they help us to do this, but there is not funding right. There is not funding for research. Cost actions are for networking.

How much work is it really? I'm in a cost action at the LEN for a holistic approach to timber. It's very flexible. People who want to do more can do more. People who just want to be in the meetings I guess it's fine with them just being at the meetings, present there so you can dose the amount of work you take on yourself. How did it look in your cost action?

Same. If you want to be more active, you're going to have opportunities to be more active. If you're busy, it's very difficult to get commitment for four years for somebody to work a lot Life changes and maybe something that you think that you cannot do afterwards. It's very flexible and you can put the effort that you consider and if you are willing to collaborate, you're going to have opportunities. So, yeah, I'm very positive towards this.

Thank you. I think it's the first time I've discussed cost actions on the podcast, so thanks for this little insight. Great to have your opinion, nives. It was a pleasure to have you in the podcast.

Can I put something here now that we are on it?

Absolutely.

I am also a co-chair of the Diversity, equity and Integrity Committee in IAEA FSS, and this can also be a good way of collaborating with the community, if anybody is interested in.

Absolutely, and there's also the subgroup for emerging young researchers, which I would also highly encourage young researchers to join. Collaboration through IAEA FSS is also very valuable. Thank you for this plug in. I appreciate it a lot, nives, it was a huge pleasure to have you in the podcast. Very interesting thing to try and take knowledge from the South and interpret in the North. Because of how the world is shifting and I assume this is only going to grow the amount of researchers researching this topic, the amount of problems, unfortunately, that we have, the amount of research that's going to be needed. So a very interesting direction for high safety engineering. I wonder if we could foreseeing this. 20 or 30 years ago I don't think we could, but today I foresee that it's going to be on the road in the future. Fantastic to have leaders like you working on this already, and all the best for your future.

Thank you and thanks for the invitation. It was a pleasure to be here. Maybe we can repeat this in five or 10 years and see what the situation is.

I'm booking already for the. I know it's hard to book you, so I'm booking already. At the end of the extreme wildfire cost action, we need to do a repeat. Put it in your calendar 2020. Put me somewhere in 2026. Thank you, nives, and that's it. Thank you for listening. It seems I have summarized it already during the end of the conversation with Nives, so I'm not going to summarize with the same words once again. This is it An interesting direction for fire safety engineering, something we should be more aware of, something that will influence our profession in short time I think shorter than longer and something we need to think about more. Also, the transposition of knowledge from South to North, because this is as I thought. It's not just about showing pictures of burning mountains and town people. How you prevent that. It's a social, cultural challenge that we need to find a solution for and I'm most thankful to Nives for sharing this with me. Thank you for listening to this episode. You may have noticed the sound quality is a little different than usual in the fire science show. This is because I was recording this from my backup fire science show vehicle. I've lost my internet connection in the place where I was supposed to record. I had to quickly figure something out. I've literally recorded this episode at a supermarket parking. I was not kicked out of it for recording a podcast episode about fire. That's great, but unfortunately the quality is not as in my beautiful fire science studio closet, which I use right now to record this short message to you. Anyway, thank you for enduring with the quality and I hope it was not deteriorating your podcast listening experience and in future episodes we're back to good old fire science show studios quality. Thank you very much for being here with me and I am looking forward to host you here once again next Wednesday. See you there. Bye, this was the fire science show. Thank you for listening and see you soon.