Impacts of Forest Fires on Society: the Case of Andilla (2012) and Bejís (2022) (Castellon, Spain)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/cig.7206Keywords:
community resilience, collective memory, solastalgia, social capital, Alto PalanciaAbstract
Forest fires are complex socio-ecological phenomena that profoundly transform the landscape, but also the dynamics of human communities and their perception of security, especially in rural territories affected by depopulation processes. In a context of increasing magnitude of forest fires and intensifying risk in the Mediterranean, in this study we analyzed, in a certain sample, the psychosocial impact of the Andilla (2012) and Bejís (2022) fires in the Alto Palancia region (Castellón, Spain), with the aim of discerning whether these fires affected their social cohesion, perception of security and community response capacity. An exploratory qualitative methodology has been used, based on eleven semi-structured interviews with residents, technical staff, associations and young people, whose findings were triangulated with documentary review. The information is processed through qualitative thematic analysis, in order to capture both their experiences and the collective processes of reconstruction. The results suggest a heterogeneous emotional experience among the interviewees, marked by the coexistence between trauma, anguish and normalization of risk; a perception of distrust towards institutional management; and an intense community resilience in the short term, but fragile and difficult to sustain without external structural support that transcends the initial neighborhood mobilization. Likewise, differences were observed between the discourses of the young and adult participants on the interpretation of fire, as well as a strong territorial root that influences the collective memory, the resignification of the territory, and the reconstruction of the sense of security after the disaster. Compared to the literature, the findings suggest that solastalgia, accumulated vulnerability, and lack of community participation conditioned the sample's social recovery after these large fires. The findings suggest that the emotional dimension, the relationship between institutions and citizens and sustained participation are relevant elements to understand the processes of social recovery after forest fires in the case studied. In this study, we suggest moving towards models of territorial resilience that recognize the value of local knowledge, community dynamics and collective memory as key axes to face future fires, also opening lines of research aimed at deepening the longitudinal evaluation of these impacts.
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