Purpose The way that disasters are managed, or indeed mis-managed, is often represented diagrammatically as a “disaster cycle”.
This report focuses on a critical aspect of working towardscommunity fire adaptation: analyzing effective land use policy and regulatory solutions in thewildland-urban interface (WUI). The WUI is any area where the built and natural environmentscreate a set of conditions that allow for the ignition and continued spread of wildfire.
Wildfire is an annual threat for many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. In some severe events, evacuation is one potential course of action to gain safety from an advancing wildfire.
Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations.
Optimized wildfire risk reduction strategies are generally not resilient in the event of unanticipated, or very rare events, presenting a hazard in risk assessments which otherwise rely on actuarial, mean-based statistics to characterize risk.
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.
Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments.
Because wildfires don’t stop at ownership boundaries, managers from governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Northern Colorado are taking steps to pro-actively “co-manage” wildfire risk through the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative (NCFC).
Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leadingsome fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solelyon the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI)communities.
The global COVID-19 pandemic will pose unique challenges to the management of wildlandfire in 2020. Fire camps may provide an ideal setting for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virusthat causes COVID-19. However, intervention strategies can help minimize disease spread andreduce the risk to the firefighting community.