Purpose The way that disasters are managed, or indeed mis-managed, is often represented diagrammatically as a “disaster cycle”.
Wildfire is an annual threat for many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. In some severe events, evacuation is one potential course of action to gain safety from an advancing wildfire.
Native Americans rely on tribally important ecosystem services such as traditional foods, hunting, timber production, non-timber forest resources (recreation, water), and cultural resources. Unfortunately, many of these resources may be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
People living in the Pacific Northwest confrontrisks associated with environmentalhazards such as wildfire. Vulnerability towildfire hazard is commonly recognized as beingspatially distributed according to geographic conditionsthat collectively determine the probabilityof exposure.
The overall objective of this paper is to clarify areas of debate, clearly define and contrast disparate approaches, and synthesize findings that may help address vulnerability to wildfires and other natural hazards.
In the context of ongoing climatic warming, forest landscapes face increasing risk of conversion to non‐forest vegetation through alteration of their fire regimes and their post‐fire recovery dynamics. However, this pressure could be amplified or dampened, depending on how fire‐driven changes to vegetation feed back to alter the extent or behaviour of subsequent fires.
Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems.
Wildfires burn over 7 million US acres annually, according to the US Forest Service. Little is known regarding which subpopulations are more vulnerable to health risks from wildfire smoke, including fine particles.
Multiple climate change vulnerability assessments in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA provide the scientific information needed to begin adaptation in forested landscapes.