Social and Community Impacts of Fire

Wildfire has become a growing threat for communities across the American West and a complex concern for agencies tasked with community protection. This task has grown more difficult due to the increasing inci-dence of large fires and the continued expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the area where human habitations and wildland fuels abut or in-termix.

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.

Prescribed fire is a critical tool for promoting restoration and increasing resilience in fire-adapted ecosystems, but there are barriers to its use, including a shortage of personnel with adequate ecological knowledge and operational expertise to implement prescribed fire across multijurisdictional landscapes.

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.

Existing research demonstrates that wildfire events can lead to conflict among local residents and outside professionals involved in wildfire management or suppression.

Wildfires will continue to reach people and property regardless of management effort in the landscape. House-based strategies are therefore required to complement the landscape strategies in order to reduce the extent of house loss.

Opinions about public lands and the actions of private non-industrial forest owners in the western United States play important roles in forested landscape management as both public and private forests face increasing risks from large wildfires, pests and disease.

Humans cause more than 55% of wildfires on lands managed by the USDA Forest Service and US Department of the Interior, contributing to both suppression expenditures and damages.

This article builds on findings from a synthesis of fire social science research that was published from 2000 to 2010 to understand what has been learned more recently about public response to wildfires. Two notable changes were immediately noted in the fairly substantial number of articles published between 2011 and 2014.

Over the last two decades wildfire activity, damage, and management cost within the US have increased substantially. These increases have been associated with a number of factors including climate change and fuel accumulation due to a century of active fire suppression.