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Fire is a complex natural and cultural element that cannot be treated through suppression or hazard reduction alone. While land use change and climate change exacerbate fire’s detrimental effects on socio-ecosystems, many of the cultural and ecological benefits fire embodies have been extinguished or ignored. Engaging with this complex challenge requires complex thinking, to which transdisciplinary research is best suited. As such, this thesis aimed to:
Develop an actionable transdisciplinary framework and test transdisciplinary approaches to reduce wildfire risk as part of sustainable rural development.
Chapter 2 synthesized transdisciplinary fire studies conducted to date through a literature review. Patterns, lessons and recommendations derived from case studies were subsequently compiled into a toolkit modelled on a kaleidoscope. This toolkit recognizes that varied contexts, interactions and dynamics coalesce and change throughout a transdisciplinary collaboration. Namely, these include varied contexts, interactions, and dynamics that shape wide-ranging outcomes. The kaleidoscope toolkit for transdisciplinary fire studies can equip transdisciplinary collaborators to examine and expand their work for more diverse, inclusive and equitable fire management.
Chapter 3 shifted from a global perspective to a Mediterranean scale. This study explored local social contexts in rural areas of Spain, Italy and France and assessed how social context may inform adaptive capacity to wildland fire. A targeted literature review and semi-structured interviews with 20 experts revealed patterns and singularities between these areas across the European Mediterranean. In this work, I show that these patterns and singularities act as enablers or barriers to wildland fire adaptive capacity, and that the presence of local fire knowledge and the opportunity for sustainable local development especially influence these dynamics. As such, centering local perspectives and diverse cultural values through transdisciplinary approaches is necessary to foster long term adaptive wildland fire management strategies in rural Mediterranean communities and globally.
Honing in on a case study in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, Chapter 4 applied transdisciplinary methods in the Montseny massif and wider Tordera watershed area. Based on results from Chapter 3 (namely the urgent need to uplift local knowledge and increase local actors’ empowerment), this study explored how local ecological knowledge can be leveraged to reduce wildfire risk through an adaptation pathways process. A combination of methods (a timeline and Three Horizons framework) throughout three workshops with agents of change allowed co-creation of adaptation pathways, integrating a historical perspective of the landscape while envisioning desirable futures. Results showed that local ecological knowledge and other soft adaptation strategies can contribute to broader sustainable development initiatives that can also mitigate wildfire risk. These results indicate that the adaptation pathways approach holds much potential to inform local policies and support fire-based community initiatives in diverse contexts.
Chapter 5 examined how the adaptation pathways process explored in Chapter 4 supported social learning outcomes for reducing wildfire risk in the Montseny and Tordera watershed area. This study investigated how systems thinking, shared understanding, relational aspects, and substantive outcomes emerged from the transdisciplinary process and how these outcomes can benefit wildfire risk reduction efforts. Results showed that the adaptation pathways encouraged complex systems thinking among the participating agents of change, acknowledged power relations, and provided creative local pathways to change beyond administrative changes.