Mapping the landscape of wildfire risk mitigation: understanding the links between equity, community assets, capacities, and collaboration
Date
2023
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Abstract
Wildfire is a natural process that has shaped landscapes for millennia, but its exclusion since Euro-American settlement has had negative effects on forest health and composition, increasing the risk of large, high-severity wildfires. Many communities are grappling with this increased risk, as more people move into the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and climate change exacerbates hot, dry conditions that may help wildfires spread. Actions such as prescribed burning, hand or mechanical thinning, creating defensible space around structures, and home hardening can reduce communities' risk of wildfire but often require coordination with state, local, and federal partners, as well as time and money. Here, we explore community capacity to reduce impacts of wildfire. Collaboration, time and money are just a few indicators that make up a community's capacity reduce wildfire impacts, which can affect the strategies they are able to implement (i.e., communities with low capacity may be unable to carry out many programs). Previous work has identified that these indicators along with others that constitute community capacity, while additional studies have highlighted the connection between social vulnerability and wildfire risk. However, little work has been done to understand the link between community capacity and wildfire mitigation in specific areas and contexts. To address this gap in this two-part thesis, our objectives were: 1) to access and develop various spatial datasets for indicators of community capacity to visualize capacity for wildfire mitigation across Colorado, and 2) to understand the processes that link capacity to mitigation outcomes. For Chapter 1, we conducted a first-of-its-kind study in Colorado mapping indicators of community capacity to represent variation across the state and to identify communities where high wildfire probability co-occurred with low capacity. Our findings highlight the eastern plains, the northwestern part of the state, and San Luis Valley as areas with lower potential capacity. Further, areas within Weld, Las Animas, and Archuleta counties are places with lowest potential capacity but the greatest potential for wildfire. These findings also suggest that different communities have a variety of ways they build capacity and highlight the important role that funding plays in helping communities increase their capacity. In Chapter 2, we explored local nuances and processes that link capacity to mitigation negative outcomes from wildfire by conducting 11 group interviews across Colorado. Our findings suggest that several key pieces of the process can drive outcomes: inter-organizational collaboration, leveraging funds, prioritization and planning, having dedicated staff for wildfire mitigation, building community buy-in, and engaging with various stakeholders. Creative workarounds emerged as a unique way across communities to overcome common barriers to wildfire mitigation, suggesting policy and institutional processes to streamline mitigation work may have outsized benefits, particularly in communities with limited resources. Our results highlight a need to point back to the systems that make communities vulnerable in the first place.
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Subject
governance
community capacity
wildfire