Wildland Urban Interface
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Conditions such as dense vegetation and drought have resulted in more severe wildland fires in recent years, and some communities are experiencing the devastating effects of these fires. Federal agencies can collaborate with nonfederal stakeholders to reduce the risk of wildland fires. This is a key aspect of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. The Government Accountability Office recommends that federal agencies work with the Wildland Fire Leadership Council—which provides oversight and leadership for the strategy—to develop measures to assess progress toward achieving the strategy’s goals.
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This study suggests that policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed.
Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are:
- recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends;
- targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire;
- actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities;
- incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire.
These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildland–urban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire.
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This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. First, vulnerability is variegated between households within communities, including those in more affluent areas. Second, household vulnerability is collectively altered, and oftentimes reduced, by the broader affluent community within which individual households reside. By paying closer attention to the affluence–vulnerability interface the paper reveals a recursive process, which is significant in the context of building more disaster resilient communities.
Access community planning tools.
The Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW) program provides communities with expertise in land use planning, forestry, risk assessment, and research to identify and reduce local wildfire risks and costs. Learn even more background and access other tools at Headwaters Economics.
Access app and tool.
The Sage Grouse Initiative Interactive Web App is a tool to catalyze and improve habitat conservation efforts across the western United States. It presents cutting-edge geospatial data covering 100 million acres, which helps visualize, distribute, and interact with information about the sagebrush-steppe ecosystem.
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This study proposes using the principles of risk analysis to provide land management agencies, first responders, and affected communities who face the inevitability of wildfires the ability to reduce the potential for loss. Overcoming perceptions of wildland urban interface fire disasters as a wildfire control problem rather than a home ignition problem, determined by home ignition conditions, will reduce home loss.
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This study analysed the role of defensible space by mapping and measuring a suite of pre-fire variables for 1000 destroyed and 1000 surviving structures for all fires where homes burned from 2001 to 2010 in San Diego County, CA, USA. Structures were more likely to survive a fire with defensible space immediately adjacent to them. The most effective treatment distance varied between 5 and 20 m (16–58 ft) from the structure, but distances larger than 30 m (100 ft) did not provide additional protection, even for structures located on steep slopes. The most effective actions were reducing woody cover up to 40% immediately adjacent to structures and ensuring that vegetation does not overhang or touch the structure.
View guide.
This planning guide is the outcome of an international collaboration of researchers and practitioners/field managers working in communities at risk of wildfire in three countries. Initially, the team of social scientists from Australia, Canada, and the United States utilized the collective research literature to examine factors that influence stakeholder trust.
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