Is it possible to manage forest landscapes emphasizing the recovery of natural processes?
Is it possible to recover by means of rewilding a more “friendly” (less intense) fire disturbance regime?
What would be the economic cost of such alternatives?
These are some of the questions we addressed in our first stakeholder meeting for the Barcelona Metropolitan Region which took place on 7th March, 2024. The workshop brought together a group of 10 stakeholders from different public and regional institutions in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region.
Some representatives of the CREAF Team (Rodrigo Balaguer, Lluís Brotons, Miquel de Cáceres Josep M. Espelta, and Miriam Selwyn), in collaboration with the EFI Team (Elsa Varela) and the University of Wageningen (Georg Iordachescu), together with the group of stakeholders.
Context: Forest expansion in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region
Natural forest expansion brings opportunity for carbon sequestration and recreation: The Barcelona Metropolitan Region is one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Europe. It is characterised by a fragmented and highly heterogeneous landscape with multiple land uses. The region has been dominated by forest expansion due to agriculture abandonment during the second half of the 20th century, coupled with extensive urban sprawl.
The establishment of secondary forests on former agricultural land is good for carbon sequestration and offers recreational opportunities for the population.
These benefits come with the worsened risk of wildfires: Abundant secondary urban forest and the increase in aridity arising from climate change have dramatically increased the potential risk of large and intense wildfire events. As a result, tensions are rising between the desire for green spaces (evidenced by over 9.5 million annual visits to the Natural Parks in the region) and the looming threat of wildfires.
A naturalised forest disturbance regime could help mitigate this challenge: A way of addressing these challenges may be designing future scenarios for the region which include the recovery of natural processes and promote a more stochastic and naturalised forest disturbance regime. The aim would be to prevent extreme wildfire events, while also considering economic costs and the population’s needs.
Action: Rewilding narratives for the Barcelona Metropolitan Region
Brainstorming scenarios to model different rewilding approaches
Our workshop aimed to introduce the wildE project and the Barcelona Metropolitan Region case study and to brainstorm with stakeholders some possible rewilding scenarios for the region, in the context of the challenges and goals explained above.
All the ideas obtained during this workshop and subsequent sessions will be used to project scenarios, support narratives and model rewilding approaches under different climate change conditions and management alternatives. Throughout, the focus will be on the recovery of forest disturbance stochasticity. It is therefore important that the designed scenarios include the recovery of natural processes and integrated natural disturbances, while also considering economic and social costs.
Some of the proposed scenarios to be modelled included:
- Recovery of herbivory processes to develop more open landscapes by promoting extensive livestock.
- Recovery of agricultural practices to increase food security, reduce transport costs and prevent the occurrence of catastrophic wildfires.
- Taking advantage of recent disturbance events (e.g. droughts) and subsequent management actions (e.g. salvage logging) as key landscape elements for wildfire prevention.
- Relaxing the policy of strict fire suppression (i.e. controlled let-it-burn initiatives) and applying controlled burning to reduce fire fuel accumulation, to lower the probability of massive, catastrophic wildfire events.
- Bussiness as usual.
This prompted some interesting discussions around:
- The term “rewilding” – what is and what is not “rewilding”?
- Opportunities for rewilding in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region.
- Costs of rewilding.
- Ecosystem services.
There is support for carefully considered naturalised disturbance regimes
The workshop provided an excellent chance to listen to various viewpoints and perspectives presented by diverse local and regional stakeholders. There is general support among stakeholders for recovering natural processes and introducing more “smart and natural” disturbance regimes in the region, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the security of the population and social infrastructures.
Next steps…
Once the methodologies to model the different scenarios are defined by the CREAF team and the first modelling exercises are developed, we will hold another meeting to share and discuss the results with the stakeholders.