Wildfires and the Local Context: An Empirical Analysis of a Peri-Urban District

Attica region (Greece) is one of the Mediterranean areas mostly affected by significant fire danger due mainly to unregulated urban sprawl. This chapter investigates the spatial pattern of 881 forest fires reported in 59 municipalities within this area in the years 2009–2012. By directly using six fire indicators and eight spatial context indicators under a multivariate analysis framework, the idea that a given local-scale fire (whose profile is characterized through severity, density, and selectivity in land use) is connected to a specific set of land and socioeconomic variables was investigated. The study revealed two crucial domains for both size and selectivity of forest fires and demographic factors associated with the urban-rural gradient and mean income (socioeconomic background). In the first analysis domain, forest and grazed burnt land and fire density appeared not correlated with any socioeconomic variable. Moreover, some fire-related variables appeared also uncorrelated with municipality altitude and average declared income. On the other hand, in the second analysis domain, a positive correlation was identified between the total area of each municipality and the city centre distance with the percentage of burned surface per municipality, the average size of fires and proportion of cultivated land burned. In addition, these last fire variables are negatively correlated with population growth and density and the proportion of dense settlements. The final results confirm that the spatial distribution of forest fires in Attica is influenced by the urban-rural gradient and simultaneously the socioeconomic status of the resident population is an uninfluential variable in this relationship.