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      Democratizing wildfire strategies. Do you realize what it means? Insights from a participatory process in the Montseny region (Catalonia, Spain)

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          Abstract

          Participatory planning networks made of government agencies, stakeholders, citizens and scientists are receiving attention as a potential pathway to build resilient landscapes in the face of increased wildfire impacts due to suppression policies and land-use and climate changes. A key challenge for these networks lies in incorporating local knowledge and social values about landscape into operational wildfire management strategies. As large wildfires overcome the suppression capacity of the fire departments, such strategies entail difficult decisions about intervention priorities among different regions, values and socioeconomic interests. Therefore there is increasing interest in developing tools that facilitate decision-making during emergencies. In this paper we present a method to democratize wildfire strategies by incorporating social values about landscape in both suppression and prevention planning. We do so by reporting and critically reflecting on the experience from a pilot participatory process conducted in a region of Catalonia (Spain). There, we built a network of researchers, practitioners and citizens across spatial and governance scales. We combined knowledge on expected wildfires, landscape co-valuation by relevant actors, and citizen participation sessions to design a wildfire strategy that minimized the loss of social values. Drawing on insights from political ecology and transformation science, we discuss what the attempt to democratize wildfire strategies entails in terms of power relationships and potential for social-ecological transformation. Based on our experience, we suggest a trade-off between current wildfire risk levels and democratic management in the fire-prone regions of many western countries. In turn, the political negotiation about the landscape effects of wildfire expert knowledge is shown as a potential transformation pathway towards lower risk landscapes that can re-define agency over landscape and foster community re-learning on fire. We conclude that democratizing wildfire strategies ultimately entails co-shaping the landscapes and societies of the future.

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          Learning to coexist with wildfire.

          The impacts of escalating wildfire in many regions - the lives and homes lost, the expense of suppression and the damage to ecosystem services - necessitate a more sustainable coexistence with wildfire. Climate change and continued development on fire-prone landscapes will only compound current problems. Emerging strategies for managing ecosystems and mitigating risks to human communities provide some hope, although greater recognition of their inherent variation and links is crucial. Without a more integrated framework, fire will never operate as a natural ecosystem process, and the impact on society will continue to grow. A more coordinated approach to risk management and land-use planning in these coupled systems is needed.
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            Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale

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              Community-based conservation in a globalized world.

              Communities have an important role to play in biodiversity conservation. However, community-based conservation as a panacea, like government-based conservation as a panacea, ignores the necessity of managing commons at multiple levels, with vertical and horizontal interplay among institutions. The study of conservation in a multilevel world can serve to inform an interdisciplinary science of conservation, consistent with the Convention on Biological Diversity, to establish partnerships and link biological conservation objectives with local development objectives. Improving the integration of conservation and development requires rethinking conservation by using a complexity perspective and the ability to deal with multiple objectives, use of partnerships and deliberative processes, and learning from commons research to develop diagnostic tools. Perceived this way, community-based conservation has a role to play in a broad pluralistic approach to biodiversity protection: it is governance that starts from the ground up and involves networks and linkages across various levels of organization. The shift of attention to processes at multiple levels fundamentally alters the way in which the governance of conservation development may be conceived and developed, using diagnostics within a pluralistic framework rather than a blueprint approach.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draft
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: Visualization
                Role: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Visualization
                Role: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                16 October 2018
                2018
                : 13
                : 10
                : e0204806
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
                [2 ] Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
                [3 ] Grup de Reforç d’Actuacions Forestals (GRAF), Fire Department, Department of Home Affairs, Catalan Regional Government, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
                [4 ] Institut Cartogràfic de la Revolta, Barcelona, Spain
                [5 ] Geography Department, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
                Texas A&M University, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                ‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6045-8369
                Article
                PONE-D-17-29161
                10.1371/journal.pone.0204806
                6191092
                30325926
                350a8479-8697-468a-8465-5f41ec66a200
                © 2018 Otero et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 27 September 2017
                : 14 September 2018
                Page count
                Figures: 9, Tables: 8, Pages: 35
                Funding
                This research was funded by the German Excellence Initiative through the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) of the Humboldt University of Berlin. The public participation sessions were partly funded by the Spanish government´s project CSO2014-54513-R (SINALECO). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Wildfires
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Ecology
                Ecosystems
                Forests
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Ecology
                Ecosystems
                Forests
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Terrestrial Environments
                Forests
                Engineering and Technology
                Fire Engineering
                Fire Suppression Technology
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Network Analysis
                Network Resilience
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Wildfires
                Wildfire Management
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Culture
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Ecology
                Forest Ecology
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Ecology
                Forest Ecology
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Agriculture
                Custom metadata
                All relevant data are within the paper.

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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