Topic: Social and Community Impacts of Fire

The Waldo Canyon fire presented the first opportunity for partners in the national Fire Adapted Communities (FAC) Coalition to collectively assess the performance of mitigation practices in Colorado Springs in a post-fire environment and to compare the results to the mitigation strategy…

Public land management agencies have incorporated the concept of vulnerability into protocols for assessing and planning for climate change impacts on public forests and grasslands. However, resource managers and planners have little guidance for how to address the social aspects of…

As a result of the increasing environmental and social costs of wildfire, fire management agencies face ever-growing complexity in their management decisions and interactions with the public. The success of these interactions with community members may be facilitated through building community–…

Research has found that community wildfire protection planning can make significant contributions to wildfire mitigation and preparedness, but can the planning process and resulting Community Wildfire Protection Plans make a difference to wildfire response and recovery? In case studies conducted…

Whether ignited by lightning or by Native Americans, fire once shaped many North American ecosystems. Euro–American settlement and 20th-century fire suppression practices drastically altered historic fire regimes, leading to excessive fuel accumulation and uncharacteristically severe wildfires…

Managing natural processes at the landscape scale to promote forest health is important, especially in the case of wildfire, where the ability of a landowner to protect his or her individual parcel is constrained by conditions on neighboring ownerships. However, management at a landscape scale…

Although fire managers, policymakers, and communities are benefiting from better understanding of suppression costs, property losses, and community impacts of large fires,4 no generalizable empirical research has quantified the specific effect of large wildfires on local employment and wages. As…

As part of a Joint Fire Science Program project, a team of social scientists reviewed existing fire social science literature to develop a targeted synthesis of scientific knowledge on the following questions: 1. What is the public’s understanding of fire’s role in the ecosystem? 2. Who are…

Concerns about forest health and the threat of wildfire across the Western United States increasingly provide the impetus for communities to find land management solutions that serve multiple interests. Funding and procedural changes over the past decade have positioned federal agencies to put…

On the order of Congress, the federal land and fire management agencies are collaboratively developing a “National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy” (Cohesive Strategy). In order to integrate the experience and insights of community stakeholders working on fire management issues in the west…