WUICOM-BCN

Wildfires suppose a growing threat to populated areas around the world, especially in the Mediterranean arch, with a climate change scenario that leads to increasingly intense and destructive fires. Populations with an urban-forest interface -UIF- such as Barcelona with its perimeter neighborhoods scattered around the Collserola Park, are especially vulnerable to fires because they do not keep in mind in their planning basic aspects for the prevention and protection of goods and people, development and risk management. The WUICOM-BCN Barcelona Fire Reliable Interface Communities Project aims to carry out a holistic analysis of fire risk in the IUF of Barcelona, ​​focusing on the detection of the social ecosystem, and infrastructural vulnerabilities and then developing specific strategies for the city. That allows greater resilience to fire in the most vulnerable spaces. Taking advantage of the synergy between fire engineering and the sociology of disaster management and providing spaces for joint creation with citizens and local agents, WUICOM-BCN will develop and implement technologies to analyze the risk and behavior of fires in the IUF (i.e. advanced strategies for mapping and simulating fires and virtual resources tools of reality) and at the same time work with methodologies for analyzing the social dimensions involved in vulnerability and resilience to fires so that the proposed prevention and self-protection solutions are inclusive and sensitive to the diversity and intersection of the various forms of social vulnerability. As a result of the research carried out at WUICOM-BCN, a sustainable action plan will be designed for resilience to fire in areas of special vulnerability in Barcelona that will be exportable to other metropolitan IUFs and will serve to inform public policies and encourage citizen participation in raising awareness and fire protection.