As a result of the increasing environmental and social costs of wildfire, fire management agencies face ever-growing complexity in their management decisions and interactions with the public.
Research has found that community wildfire protection planning can make significant contributions to wildfire mitigation and preparedness, but can the planning process and resulting Community Wildfire Protection Plans make a difference to wildfire response and recovery?
Whether ignited by lightning or by Native Americans, fire once shaped many North American ecosystems.
Managing natural processes at the landscape scale to promote forest health is important, especially in the case of wildfire, where the ability of a landowner to protect his or her individual parcel is constrained by conditions on neighboring ownerships.
Although fire managers, policymakers, and communities are benefiting from better understanding of suppression costs, property losses, and community impacts of large fires,4 no generalizable empirical research has quantified the specific effect of large wildfires on local employment and wages.
As part of a Joint Fire Science Program project, a team of social scientists reviewed existing fire social science literature to develop a targeted synthesis of scientific knowledge on the following questions: 1. What is the public’s understanding of fire’s role in the ecosystem? 2. Who are trusted sources of information about fire? 3.
Concerns about forest health and the threat of wildfire across the Western United States increasingly provide the impetus for communities to find land management solutions that serve multiple interests. Funding and procedural changes over the past decade have positioned federal agencies to put greater emphasis on multistakeholder partnerships and public outreach efforts.
On the order of Congress, the federal land and fire management agencies are collaboratively developing a “National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy” (Cohesive Strategy).
Recent literature suggests that natural disasters such as wildfires often have the short-term effect of ‘‘bringing people together’’ while also under some circumstances generating social conflict at the local level. Conflict has been documented particularly when social relations are disembedded by nonlocal entities and there is a perceived loss of local agency.
Wildfire represents a serious challenge to communities in the rural West. After decades of fire suppression, land managers now perceive a greater role for wildfire in the ecosystem.