Israel’s hotter, drier summers have made major wildfires, including the 2010 Carmel disaster and the 2021 Jerusalem Hills fire, increasingly common. KKL is now leading a national project that uses remote sensing and advanced simulations to shift forest management from passive firefighting to strategic risk management. The project will be presented at the 54th Annual Conference on Science and the Environment, set for July 8 to 9 at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.
The effort is based on the finding that vegetation in Israel has changed sharply over recent decades. According to the 2023 State of Nature report by the Mesarag, vegetation vitality and density in the Mediterranean region rose by an average of 36 percent over the past four decades. Mor Ashkenazi, KKL’s forest management official for fire prevention and postfire restoration, said there is now “more fuel per unit area,” because suppressed grazing and fewer historic disturbances have allowed biomass to accumulate, leaving large forest areas drier and more vulnerable.
Ashkenazi said wildfire planning used to rely heavily on local judgment, with foresters deciding what to do based on what seemed urgent at the time. The new project replaces that approach with four steps, selecting a simulation model, mapping relevant fuel types across Israel through nationwide field measurements, running extreme scenarios, and producing hazard maps. Those measurements quantify needles, branches and other combustible material, data that had not previously been collected in Israel at this scale.
The data feed into FlameMap, a simulation system developed by the U.S. Forest Service and adapted for Israel’s vegetation. It combines terrain and weather to generate updated risk maps and forecast how a fire will behave over the next three hours depending on wind direction and humidity. KKL says the goal is to place prevention measures in the right spots before a fire starts, not just around towns but also inside forests and along key routes, and to create a common planning language with the Israel Fire and Rescue Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and other agencies.
Ashkenazi stressed that the model is not a magic solution, but a strategic tool for reducing damage and learning from each incident. He also warned that every fire in Israel is human-caused, saying people must not leave cigarettes or campfires unattended and must make sure a fire is fully extinguished.
