Lessons learned from crisis management of forest fires - elicit to learn crucial post-crisis lessons

The EU project ELITE (Elicit to learn crucial post-crisis lessons) was a Coordination and Support action project, completed in the period of January 2013 to June 2014. The project received funding from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration from the grant agreement no. 312497 and had a budget of 940, 434 Euros. This report is the first of four publicly available deliverables in the ELITE project that study lessons learned from respectively forest fires, earthquakes and floods. The purpose of this report is to identify the most relevant problems related to the crisis management of forest fires, and to systematize and analyze any lessons learned. The report captures both the process of learning from crises and the challenges of sharing lessons learned. This is especially important as many groups and organizations lack the capacity and structures to learn from previous incidents. Through the use of various qualitative methods the report presents different lessons identified and learned. The main finding was that challenges in managing forest fires are related to: (i) Knowledge, (ii) Interoperability, (iii) Preventative measures, (iv) Equipment, (v) Communication, (vi) Technological innovations, (vii) Recovery, and (iix) Learning before, during and after a crisis. A strong link between forest fires and climate change was identified, and research to date indicates that both the incidence and severity of forest fires will increase dramatically. A real case from Poland is included to describe some characteristics of large scale forest fires. The methods used to gather information for this report was a scenariobased workshop including crisis management experts in Weeze, Germany, in April, 2013, as well as a questionnaire, which was sent to the experts immediately after the workshop. Some of the experts were noted as end users and formed the ELITE Community of Practice (CoP). The questionnaire was developed to verify information as well as to provide information on topics not covered in the workshop. Different sources have been used for the literature review, for example results from various EU projects. The importance of learning from crises and sharing experiences is stated throughout the report. Creating a good environment to share experiences is necessary to learn from crises, and the report presents the Facilitated Learning Analysis Process (FLA), developed and used by the US Forest Service. Some of the principles the FLA process is built upon are meant to promote sharing of information. Furthermore, the report touches upon how challenges related to forest fires are related to different types of learning, such as experiential, explanation based and ‘technical and competence’ based learning. Finally, the report found that crisis managers mainly shared best practices from four topics (i) learning, (ii) personnel (competence), (iii) technical equipment and (iv) interoperability. A table is presented summarizing the main lessons learned categorized according to topics defined by the authors when systematizing the results from the workshop, literature studies and the questionnaire.