Date: 28 July 2022
Time: 13:00 – 14:00
Platform: MS Teams
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/n125hqQKSM
A MS Teams lion will be sent to all registered participants.
Climate change and the need to learn to live with fire - A South African case study.
Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires are becoming more common around the world, and South Africa is no exception. The increase in temperature and droughts due to climate change, the build-up of available fuels, and the growing number of houses constructed in high-risk areas have increased the WUI fire risk and the fire season duration. In this lecture, we will holistically analyse the factors that influence the outcome of South Africa's most destructive WUI fire, the 2017 Knysna fires incident. This incident affected more than 19,000 ha, destroyed more than 1,000 homes, over 10,000 people were displaced, and eight fatalities were reported. Through the reconstruction and analysing of the fire, we try to determine what the impact of the weather and climate conditions were, what the role of the vegetation was, and how effective the mitigation measures were. To conclude, we will discuss recommendations for reducing the impact of WUI fires.
More about the presenter: Dr Natalia Flores-Quiroz
Natalia Flores-Quiroz (PhD, MSc, BEng) is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Fire Engineering Research Unit at Stellenbosch University. She holds a M.Sc. in Fire Safety Engineering from Ghent University. She was a consulting fire engineer working on mining projects in Chile prior to joining academia.
Her areas of research include reconstruction of past fire incidents, low-income settlements fire safety and wildland urban interface (WUI) fires. She is currently applying her work, as a Postdoctoral researcher, to one of the world's largest refugee camp fires which occurred in Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh. She is also active in research on a variety of fire-related topics, and is supervising MEng and PhD students.
Apart from publishing four journal papers, and co-authoring another four through her studies, she also received a Society for Fire Protection Engineering (USA) student grant for her work.
