Healthy Hillsides
The Healthy Hillsides project is a collaborative approach to wildfire management, supported by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development through Welsh Government. Steered by four core partners; Natural Resources Wales; South Wales Fire & Rescue Service; Wildlife Trust for South & West Wales; and Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council, the initiative champions a collaborative working for integrated wildfire management on a Landscape scale.
Working with key organisations, stakeholders, and communities, the Healthy Hillsides project focuses on creating a proactive year-round solution to a seasonal wildfire problem through evidence building and demonstration trials within the South Wales Valleys. We have taken a co-productive approach to exploring the issues and making recommendations. Healthy Hillsides explores wildfire as an environmental, socio-economic, cultural, and incident response challenge. The project has looked at the many and varied environmental and social connections to wildfire. It is recognised that no one action can tackle the challenge of wildfire, to irradicate, minimise or reduce impact. A suite of actions across society are needed to ensure a resilient landscape, resilient communities, and resilient public services.
Prevention: To adapt and change behaviours which will create a wildfire wise culture across communities, public services, and land managers. This will act to reduce the behaviours which increase risks and build resilience to wildfire.
Response: Actions to reduce risk, tackle ignitions, fuels, and ways in which we manage the landscape, our interaction with the environment and tactical response to wildfire.
Education: Increase understanding of the wildfire cycle, how actions can reduce or increase risk. Raise awareness of the environmental and social connections to wildfire and the Welsh landscape. Build capabilities to adapt and to act preventatively to reduce wildfire, to build resilience in the environment and social, wellbeing and economic resilience in communities.
This report captures the learning from the Healthy Hillsides demonstration project, particularly the community and wider engagement. This report takes the learning and makes a series of recommendations to build wildfire resilience within communities, through action and awareness on the ground and the need for a more integrated strategic approach in policy. This report looks at how a community can adapt and change behaviours to mitigate the risks of wildfire, particularly on the urban – rural interface.