Extensive grazing to support wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean
A dialogue with our new Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, Elsa Varela, on her research to improve the socio-ecological resilience to wildfires in the Mediterranean basin.
Elsa Varela is a postdoctoral researcher with expertise on silvopastoral systems, rural livelihoods and environmental valuation of ecosystem services in the Mediterranean. She recently joined the Social-ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems group to investigate innovative strategies for improving the sustainability and resilience of multifunctional landscapes and their associated farming systems. Read on to learn more about her background and research plans for the coming months.
Welcome to this blog, Elsa! Could you tell us more about your work at the Social-Ecological Interactions group?
Thank you. It’s my pleasure to join this forum and contribute to the portfolio of research stories. I have previously enjoyed the blog as a reader so it’s very amusing to be today on the other side. I am a guest researcher in the group granted with an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation senior fellowship. My work will focus on the analysis of innovative approaches, including product labelling and market-based incentives, to promote sustainable and wildfire-resilient landscapes in the Mediterranean region.
I am interested in how traditional landscape management practices, such as extensive livestock grazing, can contribute to maintain mosaic landscape structures that can reduce wildfire risk, along with other potential benefits, such as biodiversity enhancement and ecosystem service provision.
What a fascinating research topic! Could you explain us a bit more about why this practice is so promising and should be promoted?
Forest expansion and increasing density of existing forests in Euro-Mediterranean countries is occurring as unplanned encroachment, associated with land abandonment. This triggers a number of trade-offs between improved provision of ecosystem services (e.g. increased carbon sequestration and soil retention) but also some undesired effects, amongst which wildfires are paramount, and are expected to increase in terms of both intensity and area affected.
My research builds on the evidence that mixed agro-silvopastoral and forest landscape mosaics can serve multiple goals of provisioning ecosystem services and, crucially, increase fire resilience and generate societal benefits, by saving fire suppression costs.
Promoting sustainable and wildfire-resilient landscapes where these mosaics are more prevalent will require a shift towards adaptive and cost-efficient policy responses. These responses may be based on direct changes in landscape and fuel-load management, or indirect changes in rural development models, and ultimately, a behavioural shift (whether of farmers, forest owners, consumers or policy makers).
What specific research topics are you currently working on, and how is your research contributing to wildfire prevention in Mediterranean landscapes?
During my fellowship in the SEIAS group, I will be working on mapping and characterizing innovative initiatives for wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean aimed at tackling wildfire-risk by enhancing traditional management practices in the Mediterranean region. The overall aim is to understand how these practices can be promoted and what challenges are encountered in their advancement.
The working hypothesis is that rendering these agroecosystems viable relates to multidimensional policies and mechanisms that, on the one hand, reward and compensate the rural dwellers for the opportunity costs related to maintaining and enhancing these landscapes, while on the other hand, support strategies aimed at increasing their profitability.
I will also be analysing the data of a Spanish research project on silvopastoralism that I coordinated as PI in eastern Spain, in collaboration with Professor Ana Olaizola from the University of Zaragoza in Spain. In this project, we addressed silvopastoral systems in eastern Spain, in two case study areas in the regions of Aragon and Catalonia.
Silvopastoral systems combine wood perennials with forage and livestock. These multipurpose wood-pasture habitats represent an important part of European biocultural and ecological heritage.
Our working hypothesis was that more integration between extensive livestock farming and silvicultural management of forest ecosystems would reduce the vulnerability of both activities, while providing key ecosystem services to society.
There are numerous synergies between forest production and livestock farming: The latter can control scrub encroachment and natural extension of woodlands, while forest pastures may increase feed autonomy, reducing the vulnerability of livestock farms to variations in the availability and price of inputs. However, the management of silvopastoral systems involves trade-offs, since it entails higher labour intensity both in tree and animal tendering, potentially becoming unprofitable.
Can you tell us more about the role of farmers in these systems?
Some initiatives have arisen in different parts of Spain to reward extensive livestock farmers for the wildfire prevention services that they provide. So far, existing schemes in Spain for biomass reduction by livestock farmers are characterized by a top-down approach, with little or no involvement of livestock farmers in the design of the scheme and poor or no feedback and evaluation mechanisms to refine these payment schemes.
In our previous work, we could show that beyond crude financial implications, farmers involvement in payment schemes may also be affected by motivations such as enhanced internal satisfaction or control aversion.
To promote farmer involvement, we conducted deliberative workshops with farmers in Catalonia and Aragon to understand their preferences, values and attitudes towards these payment schemes. The results can be used to inform policy design to motivate farmers to participate in such payment schemes in the future.
We are looking forward to see your project proceed. You seem to cover very different topics in your current research. How did you come to where you are now?
Prior to my fellowship with SEIAS (Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems), I was part of the Bioeconomy and Governance research group at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (Spain).
However, my interest in wildfire prevention and extensive livestock farming started when I was working in southern Spain with the research group on Mediterranean Agroecosystems at the National Research Council in the development of a research project that ended up in the establishment of the Andalusian network of grazed fuel breaks. This was an innovative result-based program that remunerates local shepherds for the wildfire prevention services they provide with fuel breaks in public forests in the region.
With the support of my supervisor Mario Soliño, and in collaboration with other environmental economists, I assessed societal preferences for improvements in the wildfire prevention systems, including societal perceptions of wildfires and the participation of shepherds in these duties. This was the base of my PhD with the Sustainable Forest Management Institute at the University of Valladolid.
I have also worked since then at the European Forest Institute, the Catalan Institute for Agro-food Research and Technology (IRTA) and in different EU projects such as NEWFOREX, TREASURE, looking at societal preferences for active management of forests systems and traditional agroecosystems that are key for the delivery of ecosystem services to the whole society. I consider myself a cross-disciplinary scientist and I am looking forward to the exchange and enrichment at SEIAS.
We’re happy to have you with us!
Further reading:
Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2022. Scanning the solutions for the sustainable supply of forest ecosystem services in Europe. Sustainability Science 2: 1–17.
Lecegui et al. 2022. Disentangling the role of management practices on ecosystem services delivery in Mediterranean silvopastoral systems: Synergies and trade-offs through expert-based assessment. Forest Ecology and Management 517: 120273
Nocentini et al. 2022 Managing Mediterranean Forests for multiple ecosystem services: research progress and knowledge gaps. Current Forestry Reports 8: 229–25
Torralba et al. 2018. A social-ecological analysis of ecosystem services supply and trade-offs in European wood pastures. Science Advances 4: eaar2176
Plieninger et al. 2022. Biocultural conservation systems in the Mediterranean region: the role of values, rules, and knowledge. Sustainability Science, 1: 1–16.
Varela et al. 2022. Extensive Mediterranean agroecosystems and their linked traditional breeds: Societal demand for the conservation of the Majorcan black pig. Land use Policy 112: 105848
Varela et al. 2022. Unravelling opportunities, synergies and barriers for enhancing silvopastoralism in the Mediterranean. Land use policy 118: 106140
