A toolkit for fostering co-creation and participative community engagement with vulnerable communities at risk

Abstract

This deliverable aims at presenting the challenges of, and recommendations for, communicating in an era of extreme wildfires. The starting point of this deliverable is Wildfire Risk Communication, and the need to go beyond focusing just on risk by expanding our communication efforts into the broader arena of Wildfire Communication. Therefore, the core of this deliverable provides specific recommendations for doing Wildfire Communication, by responding to the challenges of our times, and particularly, by engaging and communicating with communities in their local contexts. This deliverable is particularly useful for those people and organisations working locally with communities at wildfire risk. This includes, amongst others, community facilitators, rural development workers, and environmental educators, who are knowledgeable on conducting a more inclusive, participatory, and locally situated type of communication, as this deliverable proposes. To conclude, there are no silver bullets nor shortcuts for transitioning from a Fire Suppression paradigm towards Living with Wildfires. This is unlikely to be achieved as long as we only use Wildfire Risk Communication, as it focuses mainly on the risk dimension, leaving out all other aspects of how wildfires are intrinsically interwoven in our socioenvironmental systems and thereby overlooking potential ways of living or coexisting with it. For this reason, we propose to expand towards a broader Wildfire Communication. This requires working with communities, putting their experiences, knowledges, and needs at the centre, and not vice versa. Therefore, this deliverable aims to provide inspiration and resources for such an endeavour.