ODET

The ODET project (Open Decision‑making system for enhancing Europe’s preparedness and response capacities to ExTreme wildfires), funded by the European Union under the UCPM 2025 KAPP call, aims to strengthen Europe’s ability to anticipate and respond to extreme wildfire behaviour.

Extreme wildfires are rare but devastating events, driven by complex interactions between fire behaviour and atmospheric dynamics. Emergency services face difficulties predicting such events due to limited knowledge, high uncertainty, and insufficient operational tools, which complicates planning and response and creates safety risks for responders and the population.

ODET builds on advances achieved in EWED, which expanded Europe’s evidence base on fire–atmosphere interactions and laid the foundations for improved decision‑making. The EWED project provided the underlying knowledge and data infrastructure that now enables ODET to develop a new system capable of forecasting the potential for extreme fire behaviour through enhanced modelling and an expanded archive of real and virtual wildfire cases.

ODET’s aim is to transform knowledge into an operational system that empowers emergency organisations to make better decisions.

Over its implementation period, ODET will deliver a set of tools and resources designed to directly improve emergency preparedness and wildfire management capacities. These include:

• An enhanced open decision‑making tool, integrated into the Wildfire Data Portal, developed by EWED, with more data and new modelling capabilities to support emergency responders.
• Guidelines and operational protocols for emergency organisations, covering extreme wildfire analysis, preparedness actions, and measures that can be replicated in other risks.
• Training for decision‑makers, meteorologists, fire analysts and advisers involved in wildfire operations.
• Scientific publications to consolidate and disseminate new knowledge.

ODET’s outputs—data‑driven tools, guidelines, and training—will give emergency organisations practical, reliable resources to anticipate dangerous conditions and act with greater confidence.