Reducing Rural Fire Risk through the Development of a Sustainable Supply Chain Model for Residual Agroforestry Biomass Supported in a Web Platform: A Case Study in Portugal Central Region with the Project BioAgroFloRes

In the European Mediterranean region, rural fires are a widely known problem that cause serious socio-economic losses and undesirable environmental consequences, including the loss of lives, infrastructures, cultural heritage, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and the provisioning...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Fire (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2022-06, Vol.5 (3), p.61
Main Authors: Casau, Margarida, Dias, Marta, Teixeira, Leonor, Matias, João, Nunes, Leonel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture
Agroforestry
Biomass
biomass energy
biomass recovery
Burning
Carbon sequestration
Climate change
Cultural heritage
Cultural resources
Demography
Economic impact
Ecosystem services
Ecosystems
Environmental aspects
Fire prevention
fire risk reduction
Fires
Forest & brush fires
Forestry
Land use
Lignocellulose
Logistics
Methods
Population
Provisioning
Raw materials
residual biomass
Rural areas
rural fires
Rural land use
Safety and security measures
Socioeconomics
Supply chain sustainability
Supply chains
Sustainable development
Weather
web platform
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Summary:In the European Mediterranean region, rural fires are a widely known problem that cause serious socio-economic losses and undesirable environmental consequences, including the loss of lives, infrastructures, cultural heritage, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and the provisioning of raw materials. In the last decades, the collapse of the traditional rural socioeconomic systems that once characterized the Mediterranean region, along with land-use changes, have created conflicts and additional driving factors for rural fires. Within Europe, Portugal is the most affected country by rural fires. This work intends to demonstrate the importance of recovering and valorizing residual agroforestry biomass to reduce rural fire risk in Portugal, and thus contributing to a fire resilient landscape. From the results of the known causes of fires in Portugal, it becomes very clear that it is crucial to educate people to end risky behaviors, such as the burning of agroforestry leftovers that causes 27% of fires in Portugal each year. The valorization of the existing energy potential in the lignocellulosic biomass of agroforestry residues favors the reduction of the probability of rural fires, this being the focus of the project BioAgroFloRes—Sustainable Supply Chain Model for Residual Agroforestry Biomass supported in a Web Platform—introduced and explained here.
ISSN:2571-6255
2571-6255
DOI:10.3390/fire5030061