The EU-funded SAFERS (Structured Approached for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies) will equip national fire protection services with cutting-edge technologies to prevent and manage future emergencies.

The Responsible Organisation

The LINKS Foundation – Leading Innovation & Knowledge for Society - is a non-profit private Foundation established in 2018 by the Polytechnic University of Turin and San Paolo Foundation, with the aim of boosting the interaction between research and the business world. LINKS aims to promote, conduct, and strengthen innovation and research project processes, improving product implementation as well as the study of new approaches and models related to digital technology and regional development disciplines, including Artificial Intelligence, connected systems and IoT, cybersecurity, advanced calculation systems, industry 4.0, agritech and others. LINKS Foundation is the project coordinator of the EU-funded project “SAFERS” (Structured Approached for Forest Fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies), formed by 14 partners from 7 EU countries.

The problem

Forest fires are exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, which are increasing both in frequency and in magnitude due to climate change. During summer 2023, by mid-July, more than 180 hectares across the EU were reduced to ashes, more than 40% above the average recorded between 2003 and 2022 (copernicus.eu, 2023). Globally, massive fires have swept through forests and other landscapes at an alarming rate, resulting in the loss of human lives, destruction of homes and biodiversity, and emitting millions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants.

The solution and its implementation

To respond to this challenge, the EU financed the Horizon 2020 programme “Structured Approaches for Forest Fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies” (SAFERS) to support European emergency bodies in becoming more resilient across the key phases of the forest fire emergency management cycle.

SAFERS is supporting public administrations in creating an integrated platform featuring a Decision Support System. The open-source SAFERS Platform is a Big Data emergency management system that uses AI and the outputs of intelligent services to provide decision support. The platform uses information from multiple sources, which include earth observations from Copernicus and GEOSS, fire sensors in forests, topographic data, weather forecasts, and crowdsourced data from social media and other apps that can be used by citizens and first responders to provide situational in-field information.

Such data is then processed using AI algorithms to generate useful information to support the emergency management cycle. These digital tools include:

risk maps that detect fire-prone areas to better plan preparedness actions,
early detection of active fires thanks to fire sensors and cameras,
fire delineation and propagation predictions, via the coupling of earth observations, weather forecasts, and crowdsourced data, enabling better decision-making in the response phase,
impact assessment estimations on ecosystems in terms of soil and biodiversity to have a clearer understanding of the potential degree of damages in case of wildfires and to better plan restoration actions and economic support accordingly.

Two pilots have already taken place in Corsica (France) and Susa Valley (Italy), while two more will be carried out in Catalonia (Spain) and Thessaloniki (Greece).

Expected benefits

The main benefits that will come after the completion of this project, including:

Possibility to automate the emergency management cycle processes, increasing the chances of early intervention;
Increased interoperability across public sources such as Twitter/X and other public forums, thus enhancing the efficiency of information gathering;
Create a reliant mechanism for fire protection services to address more effectively future emergencies.

Current challenges

This project is however facing some challenges and other potential issues can be expected in the case of future implementation of the system. Most importantly:

Lack of skills within public bodies. To maintain the technological stack created is necessary the help of external consultants to develop and maintain the licensed software, since national public bodies that are in charge of managing emergencies often lack internal capability of this kind.
Lack of interoperability. The development of robust AI algorithms that can handle complex data across different agencies and multiple sources requires proper collaboration and coordination among the emergency response bodies and the other private or parapublic actors involved, which is difficult to steer.