U.S. wildfire governance as social-ecological problem

This proceedings contains articles, posters, and abstracts of presentations from the second Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire Conference held 27-29 April 2010 in San Antonio, Texas. The conference covered the social issues at the root of wildland fire management's most serious challenges. Specific topics included: firefighter and public safety; social acceptance of fuels treatments; community and homeowner fire hazard mitigation; public responses during fires and fire-related evacuations; fire communication and education; and the performance of fire management organizations-from operational efficiency to cost management and from community relations to risk management. The conference included 59 presentations, three special sessions, and nine poster presentations. Conference attendees included fire researchers and wildland fire management practitioners from the United States,

Environmental Research Letters

Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires. However, a myriad of human and ecological factors constrain adaptation, and existing science-based management strategies are not sufficient to address fire as both a problem and solution. To that end, we present a novel risk-science approach that aligns wildfire response decisions, mitigation opportunities, and land management objectives by consciously integrating social, ecological and fire management system needs. We use fire-prone landscapes of the US Pacific Northwest as our study area, and report on and describe how three complementary risk-based analytic tools—quantitative wildfire risk assessment, mapping of suppression difficulty, and atlases of potential control locations—can form the foundation for adaptive governance in fire management. Together...

Journal of Forestry

In the western United States and elsewhere, the need to change society's relationship with wildfire is well-recognized. Suppressing fewer fires in fire-prone systems is promoted to escape existing feedback loops that lead to ever worsening conditions and increasing risks to responders and communities. Our primary focus is how to catalyze changes in fire manager behavior such that responses are safer, more effective, and capitalize on opportunities for expanded use of fire. We daylight deep-seated, systemic drivers of behavior, and in so doing, challenge ingrained ways of thinking and acting that may be inconsistent with current intentions around wildland fire management. We pose the questions of whether all fires are emergencies that require rapid deployment and concentration of suppression resources, whether rhetoric and actions align with policy and guidance, and whether we can unambiguously define and measure what a safe and effective response looks like. Using the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a relevant test case for systemic investigation, we argue that fundamental changes in how the fire management community thinks about, learns from, plans for, and responds to wildland fires may be necessary. Our intention is to initiate a broader dialog around the current and future state of wildland fire management.

Land Use Policy, 2019

Supporting a shift in wildfire management from fighting fires to thriving with fires: the need for translational wildfire science www.nrfirescience.org/resource/23616 Despite the increasing challenges wildfires are posing around the globe, and the flourishing production of high-quality wildfire scientific knowledge, the ability of fire science to impact knowledge on the ground, for people, society, economy, and the environment, in a way that facilitates change in the current wildfire management...

Prompted by a series of increasingly destructive, expensive, and highly visible wildfire crises in human communities across the globe, a robust body of scholarship has emerged to theorize, conceptualize, and measure community-level resilience to wildfires. To date, however, insufficient consideration has been given to wildfire resilience as a process of adaptive governance mediated by institutions at multiple scales. Here we explore the possibilities for addressing this gap through an analysis of wildfire resilience among wildland-urban interface communities in the western region of the United States. We re-engage important but overlooked components of social-ecological system resilience by situating rural communities within their state-to national-level institutional contexts; we then analyze two communities in Nevada and New Mexico in terms of their institutional settings and responses to recent wildfire events. We frame our analysis around the concepts of scale matching, linking within and across scales, and institutional flexibility.

Conservation Biology, 2004

Fire performs many beneficial ecosystem functions in dry forests and rangelands across much of North America. In the last century, however, the role of fire has been dramatically altered by numerous anthropogenic factors acting as root causes of the current fire crisis, including widespread logging, road building, fire suppression, habitat fragmentation, urban development, livestock grazing, and, more recently, climate change. The intensity and extent of fires in the western United States, specifically, have dramatically increased over the past several decades. Such shifts in fire behavior have triggered sweeping policy changes that were intended to prevent or contain fires but that pose significant risks to the integrity of ecosystems and the role fire historically played in shaping them. Here, we provide a social and ecological context for summarizing this special issue on fires, including general guidelines and principles for managers concerned about balancing the risks of inaction against the risks of action over extensive areas. Fundamental to our understanding of fire is the notion that it is extremely variable, has multiple causes, and requires ecological solutions that are sensitive to spatial scale and context. Therefore, forest managers must recognize that different forest types have different fire regimes and require fundamentally different fire-management policies. Furthermore, to restore or maintain ecological integrity, including the role of fire, treatments need to be tailored to site-specific conditions with an adaptive approach. We provide a conceptual framework for prioritizing fuel treatments and restoration activities in the wildlands-urban intermix versus those in wildland areas farther from human settlement. In general, the science of conservation biology has much to offer in helping to shape wildfire policy direction; however, conservation biologists must become more engaged to better ensure that policy decisions are based on sound science and that ecological risks are incorporated.

International Journal of Wildland Fire

The United States’ National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy aims to achieve greater social and ecological resilience to wildfire. It also raises the question: cohesive for whom and for what purpose? In this article, we address the wildfire response goal and what a cohesive response means. Namely, we define a cohesive response as the ability to co-manage across scales for a more effective wildfire response. Our approach is grounded in the reality of the growing complexity of wildfire – both biophysically and socio-politically. We suggest that suppression and fire operations are necessary, but insufficient in the face of this growing complexity as we seek safer and effective wildfire response. Using network-based concepts and drawing from the literature on socio-ecological resilience, we consider how scales can be matched, what can and should be communicated across scales, and what this means for creating more adaptable institutions for more effective wildfire response. Survey r...

Nature, 2014

F ire is unique among the natural hazards that affect human communities and the ecosystems on which we depend 1 . Although humans sometimes intentionally ignite and manage fires, our main focus is on fighting them. For other natural hazards, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, there is much more emphasis on identifying vulnerabilities and adaptations. The 'command and control' approach 2 typically used in fire management neglects the fundamental role that fire regimes have in sustaining biodiversity and key ecosystem services 3-6 . Unless people view and plan for fire as an inevitable and natural process, it will continue to have serious consequences for both social and ecological systems.

Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra eBooks, 2022

There is actually a broad consensus over the need to shift from fire suppression to fire prevention strategies. To inform policies that effectively promote this shift, we distinguish between actions aimed at more fire-resilient landscapes and those focused on the protection of people, i.e., wildfire mitigation and adaptation (WM&A), respectively. With the goal of discussing the usefulness of this distinction and identifying local factors and external resources that promote preventive actions, we developed an analysis of collective WM&A actions across 116 parishes in a wildfireprone region in Portugal, Pinhal Interior. Two principal component analyses were used to explore relationships between variables expressing collective WM&A actions. Random forest was used to model how those actions are related to local factors (land use/land cover, population, institutions) and external resources for wildfire prevention. Our results showed that collective mitigation and adaptation responses to wildfire are independent, in coherence with their distinct goals, actors involved, and policy domains. Mitigation through owners' collaboration proved to be strongly related to policy funding, local economic dynamism, and demographic vitality, unlike community adaptation. In fact, adaptation responses from the local governments and the very few existing residents' collaboratives are very incipient. We conclude, on one hand, that mitigation and adaptation actions are currently supported by two unequally consolidated policy domains and, on the other hand, that both domains are equally underfunded, namely because of the difficulties in expanding owner collaboratives beyond favorable local conditions, i.e., in socioeconomically depressed regions.

Journal of Forestry, 2012

Community wildfire protection planning has become an important tool for engaging wildland-urban interface residents and other stakeholders in efforts to address their mutual concerns about wildland fire management, prioritize hazardous fuel reduction projects, and improve forest health. Drawing from 13 case studies from across the United States, this article describes best management practices (BMP) that emerged from the data for facilitating the development of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and ensuring that planning leads to action on the ground. Three BMPs are emphasized: (1) paying attention to problem framing, (2) choosing a scale where participants can make things happen, and (3) taking steps to facilitate implementation and ensure long-term success. These BMPs were found to hold true despite considerable diversity across the cases.