vulnerability

Decision support tools play an important role in determining how to strategically allocate limited wildfire risk reduction resources. However, common decision support tools generally do not account for socioeconomic or demographic characteristics which influence community vulnerability to wildfire, resulting in potentially biased risk reduction investment strategies.

Highlights

• Introduced an integrated housing-economic recovery framework that links post-wildfire housing stability to local employment conditions and economic diversity.
• Demonstrated how traditional vulnerability tools like SoVI overlook hidden and dynamic vulnerabilities, especially among renters, seasonal workers, and undocumented residents.

Wildfire’s destruction of homes is an increasingly serious global problem. Research indicates that characterizing home hardening and defensible space at the individual structure level may reduce loss through enriched understanding of structure susceptibility in the built environment. However, improved data and methods are required to accurately characterize these features at scale.

Development in the wildland-urban interface is increasing exposure to wildfire risks in the western United States. Yet, among the components of risk—hazard, vulnerability, and exposure—mitigating exposure has arguably been most difficult.

Wildfires are impacting communities globally, with California wildfires often breaking records of size and destructiveness. Knowing how communities are affected by these wildfires is vital to understanding recovery. We sought to identify impacted communities' post-wildfire needs and characterize how those needs change over time.

Wildfires increasingly threaten California’s agricultural sector, posing serious risks to farming, ranching, and food systems. We conducted a survey of 505 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017 and 2023.

In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system.

This research builds from existing scholarship to highlight the important role social complexity plays on managing and mitigating wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface.

Climate change poses a grave threat to human health with disparate impacts across society. While populations with high social vulnerability generally bear a larger burden of exposure to and impact from environmental hazards; such patterns and trends are less explored at the confluence of social vulnerability and rural–urban gradients.

Wildfires are having disproportionate impacts on U.S. households. Notably, in California, over half of wildfire-destroyed homes (54%) are in low-income areas. We investigate the relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire community preparedness using building permits from 16 counties in California with 2.9 million buildings (2013–2021) and the U.S.