Preparing for wildfire evacuation and alternatives: Exploring influences on residents’ intended evacuation behaviors and mitigations

Understanding residents\u27 intended evacuation behaviors is an increasingly important component of managing complex wildfire events in the United States and elsewhere. Growing evidence suggests that local populations consider a range of potential evacuation behaviors during fire events, yet fewer efforts explore rural residents\u27 evacuation intentions or their relationship to wildfire mitigations that reduce risk or aid in fire suppression. This study explores evacuation intentions among wildland-urban interface residents in Pend Oreille County, Washington, USA. We explore how mitigation performance (e.g., fuel reduction efforts, structure improvements, active firefighting preparation) differs across three emergent categories of evacuation intentions and evaluate whether a range of factors correlate with participants’ evacuation intentions. Our results suggest that a relatively high proportion of residents in the study area intend to stay and defend their property from a wildfire, with smaller proportions intending to evacuate or shelter in place. Individuals who intend to stay and defend are more likely to implement fuel reduction and property mitigation strategies when compared to those intending to evacuate or shelter in place. We found that elements of residency status, sex, age, presence of children in the home, and perceptions of personal efficacy and whether the property was prepared enough to not need firefighting were significant influences on group affiliation. For instance, part-time residency was significantly correlated with intending to evacuate, while full-time residents were more likely to stay and defend. Greater agreement that firefighting was not needed because a property was well-prepared was significantly related to staying and defending over evacuating

An Integrated Conceptual Framework for Adapting Forest Management Practices to Alternative Futures

This paper proposes an integrated, conceptual framework that forest managers can use to simulate the multiple objectives/indicators of sustainability for different spatial patterns of forest management practices under alternative futures, rank feasible (affordable) treatment patterns for forested areas, and determine if and when it is advantageous to adapt or change the spatial pattern over time for each alternative future. The latter is defined in terms of three drivers: economic growth; land use policy; and climate change. Four forest management objectives are used to demonstrate the framework, minimizing wildfire risk and water pollution and maximizing expected net return from timber sales and the extent of potential wildlife habitat. The fuzzy technique for preference by similarity to the ideal solution is used to rank the feasible spatial patterns for each subperiod in a planning horizon and alternative future. The resulting rankings for subperiods are used in a passive adaptive management procedure to determine if and when it is advantageous to adapt the spatial pattern over subperiods. One of the objectives proposed for the conceptual framework is simulated for the period 2010–2059, namely, wildfire risk, as measured by expected residential losses from wildfire in the wildland-urban interface for Flathead County, Montana

Categorizing the Social Context of the Wildland Urban Interface: Adaptive Capacity for Wildfire and Community "Archetypes"

Understanding the local context that shapes collective response to wildfire risk continues to be a challenge for scientists and policymakers. This study utilizes and expands on a conceptual approach for understanding adaptive capacity to wildfire in a comparison of 18 past case studies. The intent is to determine whether comparison of local social context and community characteristics across cases can identify community “archetypes” that approach wildfire planning and mitigation in consistently different ways. Identification of community archetypes serves as a potential strategy for collaborating with diverse populations at risk from wildfire and designing tailored messages related to wildfire risk mitigation. Our analysis uncovered four consistent community archetypes that differ in terms of the local social context and community characteristics that continue to influence response to wildfire risk. Differences among community archetypes include local communication networks, reasons for place attachment or community identity, distrust of government, and actions undertaken to address issues of forest health and esthetics. Results indicate that the methodological approach advanced in this study can be used to draw more consistent lessons across case studies and provide the means to test different communication strategies among archetypes.Keywords: social diversity, hazards, wildland urban interface, wildland fire, adaptive capacit

Wildfire Risk as a Socioecological Pathology

Wildfire risk in temperate forests has become a nearly intractable problem that can be characterized as a socioecological “pathology”: that is, a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Assessments of wildfire risk could benefit from recognizing and accounting for these interactions in terms of socioecological systems, also known as coupled natural and human systems (CNHS). We characterize the primary social and ecological dimensions of the wildfire risk pathology, paying particular attention to the governance system around wildfire risk, and suggest strategies to mitigate the pathology through innovative planning approaches, analytical tools, and policies. We caution that even with a clear understanding of the problem and possible solutions, the system by which human actors govern fire-prone forests may evolve incrementally in imperfect ways and can be expected to resist change even as we learn better ways to manage CNHS

Wildfire risk as a socioecological pathology

Wildfire risk in temperate forests has become a nearly intractable problem that can be characterized as a socioecological “pathology”: that is, a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Assessments of wildfire risk could benefit from recognizing and accounting for these interactions in terms of socioecological systems, also known as coupled natural and human systems (CNHS). We characterize the primary social and ecological dimensions of the wildfire risk pathology, paying particular attention to the governance system around wildfire risk, and suggest strategies to mitigate the pathology through innovative planning approaches, analytical tools, and policies. We caution that even with a clear understanding of the problem and possible solutions, the system by which human actors govern fire-prone forests may evolve incrementally in imperfect ways and can be expected to resist change even as we learn better ways to manage CNHS

The Role of Adaptive Capacity in Creating Fire-Adapted Human Communities

In this research we sought answers to the question: What are the social characteristics and conditions of human communities that promote adaptive capacity for wildfire? The Quadrennial Fire Review (USDA and USDI 2009) promotes a goal of “achieving fire-adapted communities” in the wildland urban interface (WUI), and identifies metrics for determining whether a community is fire-adapted. While these metrics address some of the biophysical conditions necessary for fire-adapted human communities, they offer little insight into the social elements that promote or sustain adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity refers to the individual and collective resources, capabilities, and actions that alleviate the risk or impacts of disturbances such as wildland fire, and support individual and community adaptive behaviors in response to changing conditions (Adger and Vincent 2005). More succinctly, adaptive capacity is a community’s ability to mobilize resources with a goal of adapting to change driven by events such as wildland fire (Nelson et al. 2007). In this project we improved our understanding of how the notion of adaptive capacity can be fruitfully applied to the problem of at-risk WUI communities. We sought advice from emergency managers, local stakeholders, and our colleagues working in the natural resources and hazards social sciences. We found that adaptive capacity is composed of a set of overt and latent characteristics that are mobilized by catalysts to adapt to disturbances, including wildland fire. We developed a model that begins to identify the social characteristics of adaptive capacity for wildfire. Finally, we suggest that more research is needed to (1) define social elements that are consistent across locales and disturbances, (2) understand how structure impedes or facilitates adaptive capacity, (3) integrate social characteristics of adaptive capacity into tools to assess the impacts of wildland fire, and (4) identify catalysts of adaptive capacity and the potential roles of different actors in adapting to living with wildland fire

Advancing Characterization of Social Diversity in the Wildland-Urban Interface: An Indicator Approach for Wildfire Management

A growing body of research indicates that communities at risk from wildfire differ in terms of the local social context that influences adaptive planning, mitigations or collective actions. Less work has attempted to document critical differences in that local social context across large samples. The research presented here explores a quantitative operationalization of an established framework for characterizing the social diversity of communities at risk from wildfire. We conducted structured interviews with key informants across nine U.S. states. Factor analysis, regression and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to characterize social context across communities and relate it to key informant evaluations of progress toward fire adaptation. Our results advance methods to systematically document how social context influences local wildfire adaptation by: (1) examining a preliminary set of quantitative key-informant measures for gauging social context across a range of WUI communities; (2) identifying related elements of social context that may collectively influence wildfire adaptations; (3) providing preliminary statistical evidence that highly related elements of local social context are correlated with expert assessment of local populations’ adaptations to wildfire; and (4) identifying differences in social context characteristics across a sample of western USA WUI communities. However, it also is important to recognize that the measures tested here serve as indicators of deeper conceptual understandings informed by in-depth case studies. Efforts to use these measures should be augmented with additional qualitative work and build from those deeper understandings by considering the complexity of local dynamics surrounding wildfire management

Re-Envisioning Community-Wildfire Relations in the U.S. West as Adaptive Governance

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

Intent to Adopt Location Sharing for Logging Safety Applications

Logging entails work in remote areas with multiple hazards and consistently ranks among the most fatal occupations in the United States. Location-sharing (LS) devices that enable users to communicate geographic positions to others have been suggested as a technological approach to improving workplace safety on logging operations. This study investigated logger intent to adopt LS-based safety practices. Employing concepts from the Theory of Planned Behavior, including intent, attitude, norms, and perceived behavioral control, we surveyed Idaho loggers at three logger training programs. We evaluated their likelihood of using LS devices on logging operations and examined factors associated with LS adoption. The results showed that Idaho loggers are likely to use (a) automatic position updates for hand fallers, (b) LS devices on all ground workers and heavy equipment, and (c) LS technology for general situational awareness. Participants also recognized specific safety benefits to LS, particularly for emergency situations, such as communicating the need for help or expediting the discovery of injured coworkers. Our findings support further development of LS technology for logging safety, particularly devices and applications that facilitate injury response for isolated workers, such as hand fallers