Vulnerability to wildfires and peri-urban areas: An integrated socioenvironmental assessment

Assuming landscape transformations as a process fueling the local level of vulnerability to wildfires, this work investigates the spatial distribution of selected land-use classes for two years (1975 and 2018) in a metropolitan region of the Mediterranean basin (Athens, central Greece). Built-up settlements and cropland expanded moderately over time, facing a slight decline in forests and semi-natural areas. These changes resulted in the inherent growth in local vulnerability to wildfires estimated using a composite indicator, namely the Fire Risk (FR) index developed in the framework of the MEDALUS international research project financed by the European Commission. Crop mosaics and discontinuous settlements were the classes contributing the most to FR growth. The empirical findings of our work suggest how the conversion of fringe landscapes toward simplified (and, likely, low-quality) cropland and pasture land, as well as the inherent fragmentation of natural/semi-natural landscape patches, is detrimental to environmental quality, increasing the potential exposure to peri-urban fires.