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The wildfire risk “problem”

High-level systems thinking �and transformative requests �for change

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Confronting The Wildfire Crisis

  • Creating a “paradigm shift”
    • Increased fuels treatment �across ownerships
  • A discrete response, a �long-worsening issue
    • Fuels, WUI, climate change
  • A “risk-informed” approach
    • Collaboration, firesheds, �priority areas��

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Triage and advancement in crisis

  • Key suggestions or recommendations
    • Strategically reduce wildfire exposure (reactive?)
    • Greatly increase fuels reduction pace, scale
    • Reliable funding for ecosystem management
    • Increase workforce, “community support”

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  • Stated focus on collaboration, responsibility
    • Builds on a long history of policy, guidance
    • Focus is on partnership, defining highest return
    • Living with fire and social diversity

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Steelman and governance

  • Similar narrative, different twist
    • Governance not prepared for fire reality
  • Temporal scales and �institutional levels
    • “Slow,” “fast” variables, �exogenous factors
  • Norms, policy, and �politics also drive response�

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Alignment and implementation

  • Key considerations
    • Fast variables drive response
    • Focus on suppression, not prevention, restoration
    • Funding problems
    • Culture and change
  • “Federated” opportunities and challenges
    • Policies, networks that integrate at different scales
    • Social and ecological thresholds
    • Expect diversity
    • Without alignment the problems get worse

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Iglesias et al… “Fires that matter”

  • Note the narrative (“crisis,” “paradigm”)
  • Focus on integrating social, ecological (SETS)
  • Probabilistic quantification in Census tracts

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Resilience through human action

  • Key considerations:
    • Risks don’t cross conceptual, admin boundaries
    • Systems approaches across landscapes
    • Cascading or secondary impacts
  • Recommendations across a gradient
    • Reduce human ignitions (e.g., power companies)
    • Prescribed fire to address smoke windows
    • Regulate, build with fire hardened materials
    • Additional consideration, justice for “social aspects”

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  • Admission that social processes, impact are key