Rural community adapts to natural forest fires! (FOREST ADAPT) is an EU funded project within Erasmus+ KA2 small-scale partnerships in adult education.

The partnership consists of the coordinator Asociatia grupul de actiune locala Napoca Porolissum (Romania) and 4 other organizations Instituto IKIGAI (Spain), ASCAE – Associazione per il sociale la cultura e l’ambiente (Italy), Local action group Balchik – General Toshevo (Bulgaria) and Asociatia Salvamont salvaspeo vladeasa cluj (Romania).

The project’s objective is to bring together local rural communities in Romania, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain (considered to be affected by fire danger) to develop a “Local Adaptation Plan for forest fires” and create internationalized local learning environments by preparing the community population and organizational staff to prevent and limit the effects of natural forest fires. Through this project, the local rural communities from the partners’ countries will benefit from international collaboration to create results capable to minimize the risk and limit the effects of forest fires as well as raise awareness about one of the major climate change challenges, forest fires, and transferring the results to other European communities potentially affected by the same danger.

The 29th of June 2022, the project’s kick-off meeting was held online, where partners had the chance to meet and introduce themselves.

Then, the coordinator of the project began the meeting with discussions about Project management finance, agreements and coordination.

The main discussions during the meeting concerned the project’s activities and timeline, along with the division of tasks.

These will be the activities the partnership will carry out during this interesting and innovative project.

1) Identify a network of partners capable to respond in an effective manner to local disasters caused by forest fires and to advice/intervene in case of similar events into a peer country

2) Participate into an international workshop held in Italy by ASCAE

3) Develop content for the document “Local Adaptation Plan in case of forest fires” and translate it in all partners’ languages

4) Create didactical materials for the course “Rapid and efficient emergency response to forest fires” based on “Local Adaptation Plan in case of forest fires”

5) International on-line training session with participants

6) Create didactical materials for the course “Preparing the local population to limit the effects of disasters in case of forest fires”

7) 3 days practical learning session and forest fire simulation with both GALs target categories, in Romania and Bulgaria.

Finally, the dissemination plan was discussed, detailing small scale dissemination activities.

Let’s start working!