The Foundation
Pau Costa Foundation is a global non-profit organization focused on wildfire management and prevention from the perspective of fire ecology.
Since 2011, we work to facilitate interaction between researchers, emergency services, public administration, private companies and society, with the aim of disseminating knowledge and promoting joint projects worldwide.
The Foundation carries out its activity in three main areas:
- Knowledge and applied science: We actively seek participation in national and international R&D+I projects, to increase research excellence and new advances in the field of wildfires, encouraging knowledge transfer and synergies between researchers, emergency services and society.
- Training and operations: Design of training frameworks to empower organizations and professionals in fire prevention and extinction. Our methodology focuses on the creation of spaces of trust for the exchange of knowledge and experiences between countries and experts from different organizations, through assistance programs in operations during wildfire campaigns.
- Resilient landscapes and societies: Enhance of landscapes resilience to wildfires through the analysis of the fire regime of the territory, and proposal of concrete actions in key points, taking into account the social and cultural specificities of the landscapes. We olse take into consideration the interactions and dependencies of the different realities that make up the rural territories, promoting living landscapes and a sustainable primary sector at all times. Moreover, we want to contribute to creating societies that are more resilient to wildfires through Education. To do so, we work for a change in the social perception of fire. We create educational materials and activities to raise awareness of the need to manage fire risk from the perspective of fire ecology, and generate risk awareness in society.
In the current climate emergency context, only with forest management and accepting that we must live with fires as an intrinsic fact of our landscape, we will achieve an adapted society, capable of managing the risk of wildfires through prevention.
Pau Costa Alcubierre
The creation of the Pau Costa Foundation responds to the idea of a team of GRAF fire analysts to create a platform, Pau Costa among them, to bring together national and international knowledge on wildfires. In fact, Pau wrote the first drafts of the project of the Foundation. He was involved from the beginning in the constitution of the Foundation, and he marked the main lines of work from the beginning. His work shaped the final project of the Foundation that today bears his name.
Pau Costa Alcubierre was born in Sant Julià de Vilatorta (Osona) on September 13, 1977. He graduated in Technical Forestry Engineering at the University of Lleida and completed a master’s degree in forest fire analysis. He began his professional career in the GRAF Technical Unit, of the Fire Department of the Generalitat of Catalonia, where he worked as a forest fire analyst in southern Europe. He participated in the European project FireParadox to write the guide “The Prevention of Large Forest Fires adapted to the Fire Type».
Pau is one of the firefighters who, along with Jaume Arpa, Jordi Moré, Ramon Espinet and David Duaigües, lost their lives in the Horta de Sant Joan fire on July 24, 2009.
