The European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations highlights that the severity and frequency of natural disasters has risen steadily over the past few decades in the EU, partly because of climate change, urbanization, population growth, and environmental degradation.1 Climate change is amplifying the impacts of extreme weather events in Europe and worldwide.2 Key trends show that climate change is contributing to increased intensity of extraordinary incidents as for instance rainfalls (causing oods and ash oods), wind storms, snowfalls and forest res, among others. Forest re season has experienced an increase in duration (number of months) in the Southern Europe and an expansion of re-prone areas northwards. The current and predicted increases in droughts and temperature, combined with the lack of appropriate management within our forests, are expected to lead to more intense forest re behaviour in most European countries3 (Figure 1).
Cyprus (2016)4.
In 2017, there was a disastrous series of forest res inside and outside Europe. More than 600.00 hectares were burnt in Chile in January 2017, during the re season in the southern hemisphere that caused ten fatalities among the re brigades. Over one million hectares of forest was destroyed (almost three times the ve-year EU average) half of which was in Portugal alone. This represents an area four times the size of Luxembourg, or over ten times the area of Berlin. Many people tragically lost their lives. More than 100 people were killed in Portugal between June and October 2017 alone. These res resulted in signi cant destruction of property and major impacts on the economy including to network infrastructure, businesses (commercial and industrial), agricultural and forestry activities5. Due to that, during the 2017, European Union sent international aid to Chile (Las Maquinas Fire, 2017)6, through the activation of EU Civil Protection Mechanism and also to Portugal and France. In the future, extreme re events will occur more frequently, with also increasing the intensity and impact of these res, that will derive into more actions of international emergency cooperation to manage such extremely incidents.
Forest res usually a ect multiple disaster management organizations, in the worst case even multiple jurisdictions and countries. Following the initial disaster event, cascading e ects can further amplify the degree and complexity of disaster situations. This imposes a high demand of cross-organizational communication and cooperation not only during response but also in the preparedness phase. Furthermore, decision makers are often not able to base their decision on all available information which leads them to skip a fundamental plan formulation phase and to make incorrect decisions.
These recent episodes of extreme forest re inside and outside the EU have shown that it is needed to ensure an e cient preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations in case of for instance extreme forest res. It means that improving the e ciency to respond to any larger incident or emergency contributes to minimizing the consequences on people, property, environment, and society as a whole. Among others, it can be reached by providing a exible platform for multi-hazard emergency planning and management, which 4European Commision: Overview of Natural and Man-made Disaster Risks the European Union may face, 2017 5European Commision: Strengthening EU Disaster Management: rescEU Solidarity with Responsibility, 2017 6See ERCC Portal, Chile Forest res EU support, 02 February 2017
Mapping of forest res in Europe: EUCPM activations from 2006 to 2016, DG ECHO/JRC. makes use of innovative technologies for the de nition of realistic multi-disciplinary scenarios and response plans. Therefore the HEIMDALL projects goal is to provide a platform as an integrated assets to support emergency management, such as monitoring, modelling, situation and risk assessment, decision support, communication tools, and organizational coordination among many actors, integrating a wide range of support tools to be used operationally by a large variety of stakeholders ( re ghting units, medical emergency services, police departments, civil protection units, command and control centres).
Knowledge capitalization and management it is also crucial for HEIMDALL. Most of these res had similarities in terms of spread patterns and re behaviour, which needed speci c response actions concerning strategic and tactical objectives. The lessons learnt from past re events, concerning the decisions that were taken and the strategical and tactical plans deployed, can be in many cases applicable to current re episodes. First-responders expressed that it is crucial to capitalize the existing knowledge from managing the emergencies of such extreme events and shared it among other emergency actors. There is then the need to design e cient tools for knowledge and experience sharing among di erent emergency actors and agencies. HEIMDALL will gather the experience and knowledge from rst-responders organizations by identifying a series of relevant case studies (Figure 3).