Fire Communication & Education
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In the face of this national challenge, Congress took bipartisan action to establish the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The legislation charged the 50-member Commission with the ambitious task of creating policy recommendations to address nearly every facet of the wildfire crisis, including mitigation, management, and postfire rehabilitation and recovery. Recognizing the urgency of the crisis, the Commission was given just a single year to conduct a sweeping review of the wildfire system and produce a comprehensive set of policy priorities.
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Biophysical and social data collected at the property level are used to investigate whether practitioner defined “communities” within a contiguous geographic area are distinct in dimensions relevant to tailoring wildfire preparedness and mitigation education efforts. Specifically, we ask: How can local, community-specific social data inform wildfire education efforts across diverse communities? To answer this question, the research attends to the notion that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to fire adapted communities by investigating what (e.g., the messaging, the programs, the communication mode), if anything, about wildfire education efforts should be tailored to the local context?
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Zander Evans will present an overview of the 10 largest fires in the Southwest during 2022. He will share summaries of forest types and burn severities for each of the 10 fires. Rich Naden, Fire Weather Meteorologist with National Park Service, will discuss the fire season outlook for the Southwest in 2023.
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This research used in-depth interviews to explore variable support or opposition to three fuels-reduction projects occurring in the same region of north central Washington State, USA. Results indicate that differential support or opposition to each project stemmed from a unique combination of social factors operating in each locality (e.g., past history with fuels treatments, values for public land, environmental advocacy networks), the relationships that local populations had with agency members conducting each treatment, and the ways that managers engaged populations in the design of each treatment. We used existing frameworks for understanding collaborative potential/environmental conflict and for documenting the influence of local social context on adaptive wildfire actions to help explain emergent lessons about support or opposition to each project.
Meeting webpage.
The National Association of Extension Program and Staff Development Professionals (NAEPSDP) Conference Committee is requesting presentation proposals for the 2023 Annual Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Topics relating to the conference theme, “Extension Elevated,” are encouraged, but all submissions will be given full consideration.
The purpose of the presentations is to share research, application, theory/philosophy, evaluation findings, methods, or innovative educational models in one of four tracks:
- Evaluation & Assessment
- Organizational & Staff Development
- Program Development & Delivery
- Technology & Communications
ology & Communications
Meeting webpage.
The 2023 Winter Meeting, hosted by Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, will feature the Western Governors and their special guests in public conversations about the most significant issues facing the region. It will be in Jackson Hole, WY.
Webinar recording.
Description: Climate change is not just a global issue, but a local and regional reality. Action is needed at all levels, and the integration of landscape conservation strategies and the natural solutions the landscape conservation community can implement at scale must be considered and supported as part of the climate solution to mitigate and adapt to our changing climactic conditions.
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This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of advancements developed while extending the theory to promote collective action for wildfire. Extensions of Wilkinson’s work include organizing a range of adaptive capacity characteristics that help document differential community capacity for wildfire adaptation, introduction of “community archetypes” that reflect patterns of key adaptive capacity characteristics across cases, and development of fire adaptation “pathways” – combinations of policies, actions, and programs tailored to a range of community conditions.
Webinar recording.
This seminar builds of the March 9, 2023 “Community-focused programs, datasets, and planning resources for wildfire risk mitigation” seminar (presenters: Greg Dillon, Eva Karau, Kelly Pohl) by focusing on how to support creation of fire-resilient communities. In particular, the presentation will highlight how the paired parcel risk and social data approach developed by the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team supports action on private land parcels, across parcels within a community, and across boundaries to nearby public land. The WiRē Team is an established interagency research-practice team that provides wildfire mitigation and research expertise, data collection tools, and products for community wildfire education and mitigation programs.