EPD-Net as a Paradigm for Raising Awareness and Reducing Forest Fire Risks through Ecological Planning and Design

Abstract

Forest fires increasingly emerge at the intersection of climate instability, land degradation, ecosystem fragmentation, settlement expansion, and institutional weakness. They cannot be reduced to combustion events triggered by heat, drought, or negligence. They are spatially produced risks, shaped by how territories are planned, how ecological systems are interpreted, how settlement edges expand into vulnerable landscapes, and how environmental intelligence is integrated into governance. This paper argues that the EPD-Net project offers a useful framework for reframing forest fire risk reduction through ecological planning and design. EPD-Net, formally titled Filling the Gap: Development of Ecological Planning and Design Learning Network and an Adaptive Smart Training Module for Disaster Resilient and Sustainable Cities, is a 36-month Erasmus+ action built around an AI-supported adaptive smart training module and a transnational learning network. In the current framework adopted for this study, EPD-Net is approached as a 32-partner, 13-country initiative. The paper does not claim that the project was designed exclusively for wildfires. It repositions disaster resilience from a narrow emergency-response frame toward a preventive, ecological, spatial, educational, and networked logic. Drawing on the project documentation and on the wider literature on wildfire risk, climate change, wildland-urban interface dynamics, ecological resilience, and remote sensing supported decision-making, the paper develops three claims. First, wildfire awareness is weak when reduced to communication and stronger when grounded in competencies. Second, ecological planning and design are not peripheral to wildfire risk reduction; they are among its structural conditions. Third, EPD-Net’s transnational, interdisciplinary, and adaptive learning architecture provides a basis for translating these principles into institutional and professional practice. The paper concludes that EPD-Net can be interpreted as more than a project output framework, since it also represents an emerging educational and territorial approach that may support ecological responsibility and fire-aware spatial planning.