High-impact wildfire events in 2025 in the US, France, Spain, Cyprus, South Korea, Japan, Syria, Canada resulted in extensive areas burned, mass evacuations, carbon emissions, smoke impact, and fatalities, further underlining the urgency for ramping up wildfire initiatives at local structural to landscape levels. This is the case for countries where fire is part of ecosystem dynamics such as Mediterranean countries as well as for emerging wildfire prone countries such as central and northern Europe.

This trend has been foreseen and predicted as an outcome of ongoing climatic and environmental changes and linked to socially constructed vulnerabilities. Factors include heatwaves, altered landscapes, losses of wildfire-knowledge, the abandonment of traditional land-use practices, and intersecting social crises where wildfire only forms one disruption that societies are coping with individually and collectively.

Moving forward, systemic solutions will be needed that attend multiple and competing values, interests and land uses, ultimately determining territorial development trajectories. We invite contributions that challenge current management approaches and
capture how the wildfire challenge is linked to large-scale land use changes and associated agricultural, nature conservation and climate mitigation policies.

This session invites inter- and transdisciplinary studies with insights on how to make academic findings policy- and action-relevant. We welcome perspectives and disciplines addressing the social and political dimensions of the wildfire challenge. This includes works that deploy different methodological approaches and data sources, ranging from theoretical studies to remote sensing, statistical analysis and/or qualitative methods.