Universities and Practitioners Promoting Wildfire Education Innovation

In the context of climate change, wildfires are among the most critical social, economic, and environmental challenges. Nevertheless, updated scientific knowledge, operational practices, and efforts regarding mitigation and preparedness are not easily accessible to the general public in Europe.

To address this gap, two practitioner-based institutions—Pau Costa Foundation (Spain) as coordinators and the Leitrim County Council (Ireland)—and two universities—the School of Agriculture of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Open University of Catalonia (Spain)—have developed an innovative educational project funded by the Erasmus+ program: The EduFire Toolkit.

This toolkit offers a set of multilingual, interdisciplinary, and open-access resources designed for middle and high school teachers and students. Following Project-based Learning and community engagement approaches includes “challenges” to promote students’ active role in researching real and local issues related to climate change and wildfires. The activities are flexible and can be adapted to different contexts and needs, as documented in the diverse pilot tests conducted by the project teams. Additionally, environmental and disaster risk reduction educators can also adjust and apply these resources.

This chapter presents the development process conducted by the consortium to create the EduFire Toolkit and highlights the results achieved thus far in its implementation and dissemination.