Abstract: Understanding why people evacuate or remain during wildfires is a key concern in fire safety. We surveyed 747 households affected by the 2023 Tenerife fire (Spain) using the same instrument as in the 2019 Kincade fire study (United States), enabling direct comparison. Results revealed agreement across both fires on the central role of pre-fire safety perceptions and threat assessment in shaping perceived risk, and of evacuation orders, homeownership, and fire cues in driving evacuation decisions, while the influence of demographic and household factors varied by context. This study demonstrates the value of standardized, cross-national analyses in identifying both consistent and context-specific determinants of evacuation, discusses the need for validated measures of constructs such as risk and threat perception, and provides insights for integrating regression-based predictive models into wildfire evacuation simulations.

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