Table 1 Summary of the Room for the River program in the Netherlands

The “Room for the River” program had a budget of more than 2 billion Euro and consisted of 39 different projects located along all the main branches of the river Rhine (Rijke et al., 2012). The project was started in 2007 and is expected to be finished in 2022. The main idea was to give the rivers back the space that was lost to development during the past centuries when rivers were channelized and floodplains became occupied by industries and residential areas and to reduce the number of people living in high flood risk areas. In Room for the River, instead of heightening the dikes, the dikes were moved further away from the river to give more space for the river by creating additional flood plains. This reduces the water levels during peak flow events and limits the risk that dikes would break or overtop. In addition to reducing flood risks, the Room for the River Program had many co-benefits. The floodplains are high in biodiversity and can be used for recreation in summer and support animal grazing. Resilient landscapes were created by adapting the land use to current and future flood risks. Areas with low flood risk are used for high-value activities and human settlement while in high-flood-risk areas the activities are limited to lower-value activities such as agriculture and seasonal camping grounds. The room for the rivers approach could be copied into integrated fire management by creating more room for fires. The concept of living with fire is not new, e.g., coexisting with fire in Canada (Abbott & Chapman, 2018), living with fire in the USA (Moritz et al., 2014) and Australia (Howitt, 2014). Applying the Room for the River approach to fire would mean creating deliberate zones where fires can occur and reducing the potential damage by removing properties and other higher-value buildings the impacts of fire reduce. Around the living with fire areas, low-fuel load zones can be implemented in the landscape to limit the spread and severity of fires beyond the living with fire zones. These zones can be multi-purpose and also serve in addressing the recreational needs of the communities and conserve and improve biodiversity by creating zones with different fire return periods.