Objectives. To describe demographic and social characteristics of US communities exposed to wildfire smoke.
Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire.
Understanding of the vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfires is limited. We used an index from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the social vulnerability of populations exposed to wildfire from 2000–2021 in California, Oregon, and Washington, which accounted for 90% of exposures in the western United States.
Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction.
Wildfires are increasing in frequency, raising concerns that smoke can permeate indoor environments and expose people to chemical air contaminants. To study smoke transformations in indoor environments and evaluate mitigation strategies, we added smoke to a test house.
Background
Wildfires often have long-lasting costs that are difficult to document and are rarely captured in full.
Aims
We provide an example for measuring the full costs of a single wildfire over time, using a case study from the 2010 Schultz Fire near Flagstaff, Arizona, to enhance our understanding of the long-term costs of uncharacteristic wildfire.
Background. Social science that seeks to advance wildfire adaptation in the southwestern US states of Arizona and New Mexico remains underdeveloped in comparison with other regions in the USA. Aim.
Wildfire science, policy, and practice lack systematic means for “tailoring” fire adaptation practices to socially diverse human populations and in ways that aggregate existing lessons.
Latino/a/x workers perform labor-intensive forestry and fire stewardship work in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, but are not well recognized in research and practice about wildfire governance.
In Washington, Oregon, and California, ignitions from recreational activities accounted for 12% of human-caused wildfires, and 8% of the area burned, from 1992–2020. Wildfires ignited by recreational activities not only increase fire suppression expenditures but have the potential to limit recreational activities traditionally associated with use of fire, such as camping.