Collaborative agroforestry for fire resistant landscapes in mountainous Western Spain
Imagine a mountainous landscape with small scenic villages dotted among the slopes. The sun burns incessantly, the grass is dry, animals are lying in the shade of the trees. You walk along the bottom of a valley, following the stream, counter to its current, towards the source. You see fruit trees, vegetables, donkeys, and goats along the way.
As you look more closely, you see parts of the villages are abandoned and the houses have begun to deteriorate. Young people are leaving the area, as they don’t see opportunities to make a living, and the city lifestyle is more attractive. This pattern of abandonment is also reflected in the landscape, where formerly cultivated systems, including grazing land and fruit tree orchards, now face ecological succession: shrubs grow thickly and pine trees are taking over.
People living in this landscape are faced with different social and ecological challenges, but one is particularly dangerous, even life-threatening: Wildfires, especially large ones.
Large wildfires increasingly occur in the region. Mild winters foster biomass growth. If hot and dry summers follow, this creates an abundance of fuel, and all it needs is ignition. Hot days with strong winds are called fire weather — a condition that make fire extinction very difficult, as the spread can be so rapid.
Increasing the numbers of helicopters and fire fighters to tackle fires is not a fully effective or efficient solution. New approaches are increasingly required. One strategy to stop wildfire spread is the preventative removal of biomass or ploughing. Such large strips that transect the land to prevent the spread of fire creates what are known as fuel or fire breaks. But more sophisticated alternatives are being considered.
The MOSAICO initiative is a group of land managers in Sierra de Gata and Las Hurdes, Spain, that actively manage land with the aim to contribute to fuel reduction. This management includes forestry, livestock grazing, crop cultivation, and agroforestry systems. The land managers create so-called “productive fuel breaks” by e.g. goat herding, planting and managing of fruit trees, resin harvesting, pine tree biomass harvesting, and implementing new practices, such as rotational grazing. The initiative is supported by the University of Extremadura, the Government of Extremadura, and the European Union. The land managers receive administrative help, field technical advice, and other services, including support in completing and submitting funding applications.
Here at the SEIAS group, together with our co-authors Fernando Pulido (Spain), Lynn Huntsinger (US) and Cristina Quintas-Soriano (Spain), we assessed the MOSAICO initiative with the aim to understand participants’ motives and outcomes. We conducted interviews with 63 participating land managers and analysed the resulting data.
We found that half of respondents feel strongly affected by wildfires, and some have psychological distress due to wildfires. The most frequently motives for participation they agreed in were to combat depopulation, preserve landscape beauty and improve personal wellbeing (over 90% agreed respectively).
From the participants’ perspective, the initiative had several positive personal and regional outcomes. The most frequently shared outcomes are the help of the initiative in combatting wildfires, followed by local ecological knowledge transfer and increased biodiversity, all being above 80% of agreement. Over 60% of respondents agreed that their collaboration in MOSAICO counteracts land abandonment, improves the regional economy and increases local wellbeing.
Initiatives such as MOSAICO can be referred to as Integrated Landscape Initiatives (ILIs), that not only help resolve land use conflicts (as most ILIs do), but may be extended to support collaborative efforts to mitigate wildfires.
Wildfire mitigation through community-based agroforestry can also finance rural revival and provide multiple ecosystem services.
Policy should support land management that reduces wildfire risk by adapting legislation and funding schemes, such as simplifying the administrative process for land managers, offering subsidies for fire preventive land management measures, allowing grazing in forests and identifying high fire risk areas to improve management efficiency.
This initiative can be a model for collaborative wildfire measures, not only for Mediterranean countries, but also for temperate ones, where wildfires increasingly become reality. Wildfires, and climate change more broadly, are challenges we cannot solve as individuals, but can only tackle collaboratively. In this case it seems to be a win-win-win-win situation: Efficient fire mitigation, revival of rural areas, diverse biodiversity-rich landscapes and livelihoods for people.
We thank the MOSAICO members and our field assistants for their valuable contribution as well as the nice pictures!
Please find the full scientific publication here:
Wolpert, F., Quintas-Soriano, C., Pulido, F., Huntsinger, L., & Plieninger, T. (2022). Collaborative agroforestry to mitigate wildfires in Extremadura, Spain: land manager motivations and perceptions of outcomes, benefits, and policy needs. Agroforestry systems, 1–15.
Contact & further reading
Bertomeu M, Pineda J, Pulido F (2022) Managing wildfire risk in mosaic landscapes: a case study of the upper Gata river catchment in Sierra de Gata, Spain. Land 11(4):465.
Damianidis C, Santiago-Freijanes JJ, den Herder M, Burgess P, Mosquera-Losada MR, Graves A (2021) Agroforestry as a sustainable land use option to reduce wildfires risk in European Mediterranean areas. Agroforest Syst 95(5):919–929.
García-Martín M, Bieling C, Hart A, Plieninger T (2016) Integrated landscape initiatives in Europe: multi sector collaboration in multi-functional landscapes. Land Use Policy 58:43–53.
You can also find me on Research Gate. If you’re interested in further details, please leave me a comment or get in touch via email: franziska.wolpert@posteo.de
