Wildfire represent serious risks for human activities and infrastructures. Furthermore, they can degrade air quality and may exacerbate natural hazards, such as an enhancement of debris flows, erosion and avalanche danger. They also have serious economic implications in forest damage, costs of fire-fighting, damage to property and environment. Every year about 45000 forest fires break out across Europe.

Moreover wildfire impacts are likely to become more serious in the future in response to the projected drier and warmer climate change. With focus over Italy, the effects of climate change on the fire risk have been characterized by analyzing the Fire Weather Index FWI (Van Wagner, 1987) for the present and future scenarios obtained under combination of global-regional climate model simulations.

In line with previous experiments (Lung et. al. 2013; Schelhaas et al., 2010, Moriondo et al. 2006), fire risk is expected to increase. In particular, the results indicate an increase of fire risks of about 5-10 % in summer in the next decades in area where forest and land cover is high, as Apennines areas, North-Western Alpine Region.