Centre d’Économie et d’éthique pour l’environnement et le développement (C3ED), Université de Versailles, Saint Quentin en Yvelines, 47 boulevard Vauban, 78047 Guyancourt cedex, France
In spite of the increased fire suppression efforts deployed and the prevention campaigns implemented since several decades, wildfire risk is raising in the entire Mediterranean region and conflicts between concerned people tend to become more and more exacerbated. Such an apparent paradox is due to a plurality of factors of different nature and scale, as for instance climate warming, which entails more frequent drought episodes (Pausas & Vallejo, 1999), forest abandonment and rural depopulation, whose direct consequences are forest expansion and fuel continuity (Badia et al., 2002 ; Cerdán, 2002), or wildland-urban interface (WUI) expansion, which raises the ignition risk and multiply the eventual fire harms (Clément, 2005 ; Napoléone, 2005). Even the traditional fire suppression policy has raised the risk of severe wildfires by the so called “extinction paradox” according to which such a strategy leads to an extraordinary and large-scale accumulation of fuel and thus, to a self-defeating management (Minnich, 2001)2.
All these factors have led some experts to talk about a “new generation” of wildfires, in which most of fires are controlled by humans, but some of them become so severe that no firebreak or aircraft are able to stop them (Castelinou, 2005 ; Galtié, 2006). It becomes more and more evident that we humans can act by several ways on the fire system3 and the risks associated, but that we are not able to fully control it and to predict its evolution.
At the same time, fire is progressively seen as a critical natural process assuring, in most cases, landscape heterogeneity and forest biodiversity. In that sense, it should be underlined that fire has always existed in the Mediterranean forests, even before human presence, so that forest current state is in part the result of centuries of fire occurrence, and most vegetal and animal species are adapted to it. Therefore, fire suppression or even its large alteration could entail irreversible ecological impacts (Trabaud & Galtié, 1996 ; Landsberg, 1997).
According to these arguments, it seems clear that the minimisation of burned hectares can not be a goal on itself: traditional fire suppression policies should be re-oriented toward the construction of new ways of living with fire.
However, such a task constitutes a deeply complex issue, not only because of the interdependencies and concatenation effects existing between the multidimensional factors explaining fire system, but also because of the irreducible plurality of concomitant and legitimate perspectives on the fire problem. Thus, competent authorities have to face both a technical and a social incommensurability (Munda, 2004). Furthermore, and as it is the case for other environmental risks, fire deals also with ambiguity, with the particularity that this one is based on evidence – interpretative ambiguity – as well as on values – normative ambiguity – (Renn, 2005)4.
As a consequence, neither a technical risk analysis, in which complexity would be ignored and risk would be decontextualised (Wynne 1997), nor an economic approach, in which the issue would be analysed as a simple conflict of interests within a common value system, seem to be satisfactory tools to design a sustainable coexistence system with fire. New ways of living with flames can not be reached by optimisation or proba- bilities; they must be collectively constructed in a dialogical and iterative process by the different stakeholders (forest owners, fire brigades, local authorities, experts, environmentalists, residents, timber enterprises, hikers...)5.
In this paper, we thus propose a reflection on how could traditional fire management be improved and transformed to a new framework adapted to the current “fire problem”. Our goal is to provide new institutional
1 A particular case study is used to illustrate the paper. the Massif des Maures (Var, France).
2 Such a paradox is a particular characteristic of fire risk: by reducing today the flood or avalanche risk, we do not increase
their probability tomorrow!
3Fire system is characterized by several parameters: frequency, severity, intensity and seasonality...
skills to the competent authorities for managing fire in ail its dimensions and in relation with the diversity of issues at stake: security, ecosystems quality, forest multi-functionality, mutual trust, local development, social resilience... The “fire problem” is therefore reframed and studied through the prism of sustainability(ies) and its(their) distribution. That is, exploring the co- evolution possibilities between the economic, biophysical, social and political spheres and their respective goals and imperatives. Such a task lies not so much on a choice for (or against) sustainability, but rather on the characterization of a societal process of resolving the question: sustainability of what, why and for whom? (OConnor, 2006). In that sense, and as soon as we accept that lire governance deals with a socio-political choice process rather than an instrumental one, such a disaggregated version of sustainability (O'Connor, 1997) enable us to make explicit the value-system conflicts about fire issues and forest roles, and to point out the unavoidable social choices and trade- offs to be made in the interfaces between the four dimensions evoked before.
Abstract references
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