Predicting wildfires losses is crucial for confronting the European wildfire crisis

Contemporary fires pose a threat to human assets in southern European regions, and aggressive suppression efforts are ineffective during extreme wildfire episodes. Nevertheless, we currently lack a comprehensive and well-defined strategy focused on creating fire-adapted communities that can effectively withstand the impact of extreme events. This paper aims to define wildfire risk, provide a proof-of-concept risk assessment example conducted in various Mediterranean regions, discuss prevalent misconceptions, and outline future research needs for developing a long-term fire-wise strategy in the European Union. Anticipating surprise catastrophic wildfires becomes crucial in preventing losses within a changing-climate scenario. Moreover, stochastic simulation modeling enables the generation of a plausible set of potential fire footprints that are likely to occur in the coming years. By utilizing a large set of modeled fire footprints and burning fire intensities in the home ignition zone, in this work, we predicted expected losses to buildings. The results showed spatially explicit outcomes and emphasize the need for implementing a risk assessment framework to identify human communities and wildland-urban interface areas at risk. The development and implementation of a probabilistic fire modeling system represent a crucial preliminary step toward developing a long-term adaptation strategy to confront the wildfire crisis in Europe.