Home/The project/Prevention

Knowing the risk is half the job. This is the other half.

The hazard and vulnerability maps say where the Karst is most at risk. The prevention abaco says what to do about it — a practical catalogue of measures local administrations, foresters and land managers can actually deploy, each tied to the part of the risk it reduces.

3
families of measures — direct interventions, landscape planning, awareness & civil protection.
5
risk functions addressed — hazard, vulnerability, exposure, response, adaptive capacity.
3
land-cover settings — forest, Karst heathland, wildland-urban interface.
119,500 ha
of FVG forest already under management plans (103 plans) the playbook builds on.
The catalogue

More than a dozen measures, in three families

Each measure names what it does, the risk it reduces, who implements it and the kind of effort it takes — so a municipality can move from a risk map to a work plan.

FAMILY 1

Direct territorial interventions

  • Selective removal of high-risk species — clear stressed, resin-heavy black pine and smoke tree that ignite easily and carry crown fire.
  • Firebreak networks — interconnected cleared strips (typically 10–30 m wide, wider on slopes) that cut fuel continuity and give crews access.
  • Buffer zones around infrastructure & homes — 10–30 m of low vegetation along roads, rail, power lines and settlement edges.
  • Safe deadwood zones — concentrate or chip removal waste away from dwellings, so thinning does not backfire.
  • Prescribed fire — low-intensity controlled burns that hold back woody encroachment, where the climate window still allows.
  • Water basins — at least 50 m³ every 4–6 km in a region with almost no surface water, to cut suppression response time.
  • Karst-heathland grazing — targeted, subsidised pastoralism that keeps grassland open and fuel low.
  • Dry-stone walls — repaired and raised to 80–100 cm, slowing surface fire while preserving living heritage.
FAMILY 2

Landscape-resilience planning

  • No new building in isolated high-risk zones — keep people and assets out of the least defensible places, through municipal master plans.
  • Fireproof construction standards — ember-resistant materials and details at the wildland-urban interface.
  • Fuel-fragmentation mosaic — a patchwork of pasture, crop and thinned strips that breaks fuel continuity at landscape scale.
  • Payments for ecosystem services — reward landowners for verified fuel reduction — pay-for-action or pay-for-outcome contracts.
  • Forest-intervention zones (ZIF) — the Portuguese model that pools fragmented private parcels into one coordinated prevention plan.
FAMILY 3

Awareness & civil protection

  • Alert messaging — national IT-Alert / SI-Alarm plus the Karst Firewall portal's own sensor-triggered email, SMS and WhatsApp alerts.
  • Awareness campaigns & seasonal rules — training for volunteer brigades and citizens, seasonal bans on open fire, and the "Gasilski kviz" e-learning app for young people.

The same playbook is being put to work on the ground — see what the pilot municipalities built. Pilot sites →

Activity 1.4 — participatory laboratories

The playbook was tested in the room, not just on the map

Across two cross-border laboratories — Sistiana, 27 May 2025 and Cerje (Miren), 28 January 2026 — about 60 farmers, foresters, fire officers and municipal staff stress-tested the science, facilitated by PiNA's "Dialogue Triangle" method.

Experts re-weighted the model, live

Foresters and forest guards separated two questions the data had blurred: what makes a fire start versus what makes it severe. In the vulnerability model, land cover rose to ~46% and rainfall to ~20%, while raw distance-to-roads fell sharply — because roads drive ignition, but fuel and drought drive spread.

Ignition vs severity

"Anthropic factors determine the number of fires; land cover and climate determine the severity." The insight that split the project's hazard model from its vulnerability model.

From talk to plan

Three working groups — grazing, dolina farming, dry-stone walls — produced 29 municipal and 8 national prevention measures, ranked by urgency and feasibility.

Capacity that stays

The labs were also training: a shared fire-risk vocabulary, harmonised cross-border data practices, and knowledge passed between elder farmers, youth and officials.

In short

A prevention toolkit, ready to use

The abaco turns the project's evidence into action a municipality can take — and the laboratories make sure those actions fit the people and the landscape that have to live with them.

See it on the ground → The evidence base

Source: deliverables D1.3.1 "Abaco of actions for wildfire-risk reduction on the Karst" and D1.4.1 "Joint participatory laboratories, knowledge co-production and capacity building" (WP1), IUAV University of Venice with ZRC SAZU, PiNA, Corpo Forestale FVG and Zavod za gozdove Slovenije, 2026.