March 2015

Developing a UK risk management system for forest fires

Climate change is likely to increase the number and severity of forest fires in some parts of the UK over the next few decades. An important step in developing resilience against the risk of forest fires was the publication last year of the Forestry Commission (FC) publication ‘Building wildfire resilience into forest management planning’ (you can download this HERE). Since then, A J Moffat & Associates have been engaged by the FC to investigate the nature of information that the forestry sector needs to increase its preparedness in times of hot and dry weather. A new phase in this project is to work with other agencies involved in wildfire risk evaluation to develop a possible decision support system which will involve the classification of forest land according to intrinsic risk of forest fire. Subject to the views of the relevant authorities, this may lead to to the adoption of a wildfire risk assessment system for UK foresters. The work will be concluded in the summer of 2015.