Fire Communication & Education
View article.
This concept paper presents a Stages of Collaborative Readiness framework. Collaborative, multi-party entities provide fundamental roles and contributions to prepare landscapes and communities to receive and recover from wildfire (identifying, connecting, and aligning stakeholders; co-developing strategies at scale; synchronizing operations; and facilitating science informed, continuous learning). The framework applies insights from the collaborative development literature to the context of forest and wildland fire risk management. It embeds the fundamental roles and contributions within a four-stage framework, identifying stage appropriate benchmarks and outcomes to increase the ability of a collaborative over time to serve those important functions.
View report.
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.
View article.
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?
View webinar recording.
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.
View article.
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 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.
View article.
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.
Webinar recording.
Much of the current dialogue around mitigating wildfire risk to people and property in the United States focuses on vegetation treatments to reduce fuel loads on public lands. There is good reason for that – responsible management of lands within their jurisdiction is embedded within the mission of the Forest Service and other land management agencies. However, we can conceptualize wildfire risk to the built environment as having three primary components: likelihood of wildfire occurrence, intensity if a fire occurs, and susceptibility of an asset (e.g., a structure) to being damaged by a fire. Under this framing, treating fuels on public lands, sometimes far away from assets at risk, has a limited ability to reduce the likelihood and intensity of fire at the location of those assets, and has no effect on the susceptibility of the assets to damage. Conversely mitigation actions that have the greatest leverage on wildfire risk to built assets include reduction of fuels immediately adjacent to the asset and physical measures that can reduce the ignitability of a building. Examples of this include implementing Home Ignition Zone principles and using fire-resistant building materials. In this seminar, we will share examples of work happening within, or funded by, the Forest Service to foster these types of locally-focused mitigation actions and underscore the importance of these actions in the broader scope of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.