Month: February 2020

Experts meet to analyse the CO2 risk emissions due to forest fires.

The follow-up meeting of the Interreg Sudoe REMAS-SOE3/P4/E0954 project “Greenhouse gas emissions risk management in forest fires” was held in Madrid on February 19 and 20. The project led by the Association of Forest Municipalities of the Comunitat Valenciana (AMUFOR) has prestigious partners such as the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV-ITACA), the University of Valencia (UV-CIDE), the Provincial council of Valencia (DIVAL), the National Institute of Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA), the Municipality of Loulé (CML), the Higher Institute of Agronomy (ISA), Bordeaux Sciences Agro – National School of Agronomic Sciences of Bordeaux and associated partners.

REMAS has a budget of € 1.8 million and is funded by the Interreg Sudoe program through the ERDF funds. REMAS addresses the GHG emission risk to the atmosphere as a result of a forest fire.

REMAS, given the proliferation of forest fires in the Sudoe area, is working on an emission risk model that links the carbon contained in the aerial-root biomass and in soil. The quantification of carbon contained in the ecosystem allows to know its emission risk, as well as the critical areas of greatest risk in order to focus prevention, management, extinction and restoration efforts.

With three years of duration, REMAS will obtain quantitatively the emission risk of some of the most Sudoe representative ecosystems. The knowledge acquired will be transferred to the authorities and technicians through specific training that allows the scientific knowledge acquired in the project to be transferred to the reality of the Sudoe territory.

The Generalitat’s Emergency Coordination Center and the Research Group on Information and Communication Technologies against Climate Change (ICTvsCC) of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) met on February 3, 2020 to introduce the results obtained in the framework of the Convention “Investigation into forest fires extinction”. Among the issues raised by the project is the establishment of a new predictive model that updates and defines the levels of forest fire risk through new remote sensing technologies by satellite.

In this way, the possibility of working with two potential fire risk indexes is contemplated, one of a social nature or of citizen public information, and a strategic one of an internal and operational nature that could be used from the Emergency Room of the Coordination Center or from the own direction of extinction on the ground. This last index would allow the director of the extinction to be provided with information on quantitative data to be helped in the decision making to deal with the forest fire.

On the other hand, during the conference the REMAS project was introduced to the Agency in order to explain the progress being made in this area, which deals with fires from the perspective of their impact on climate change due to sudden release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Among the attendees were numerous technicians from both institutions (Agency and UPV) and interesting discussions were held on the subjects addressed.