The South East of England Wildfire Group (SEEWG) exists to provide a regional partnership approach to tackling the growing risk of wildfire. The regional group brings together three landscape scale working areas for operational delivery; New Forest, Home Counties and Ashdown Forest.
The partners came together following numerous wildfires since 1999. After a serious wildfire on Thursley Common in 2006, which resulted in three fire fighters being badly injured, considerable equipment destroyed and large areas of ecology being lost, focused both senior managers from both the Fire and Rescue Services and Land Management organisations to work together in a more strategic and operational manner.
The group made a good start, however they quickly realised that they required professional management to make more significant progress towards its goals. There were two main challenges; staff time and funding. While the partners are committed to the project, wildfire is only a very small part of their overall job role and this severely restricts capacity to deliver. The group also requires dedicated funding as again, the partner organisations do not have access to budgets that can fund the scale of the work required.
Based on our reputation for successful work with Northumberland and Cumbria fire groups, the SEEWG chair invited RDI to assist with the development of their group.
RDI bring a unique set of skills and experience to the project. RDI is perfectly placed to work with fire groups:
• Wildfire expertise: RDI have been working in the field of wildfire since 2003, and are probably the UK’s leading provider of wildfire project management solutions.
• Partnership working and facilitation: The vast majority of projects are delivered in conjunction with partners. Our experience of facilitation has enabled us to work with all of the partners to identify and define outputs for a two year development phase, our independence is a great asset in this situation.
• Funding: RDI are highly experienced at sourcing and securing public funding for projects.
• Project Management: This is the core of RDI’s business, at any one time we can be managing over 50 projects.
To find out more about RDI's wildfire work, please click here.
