Sustainable coexistence with wildfire requires overcoming vicious cycles that trap socio-ecological systems in maladaptive states. A carefully coordinated programme of innovation, education and governance, the ‘wildfire adaptation triad’, is essential for escaping maladaptation across national, community and individual scales.
Landscape fragmentation is statistically correlated with both increases and decreases in wildfire burned area (BA). These different directions-of-impact are not mechanistically understood. Here, road density, a land fragmentation proxy, is implemented in a CMIP6 coupled land-fire model, to represent fragmentation edge effects on fire-relevant environmental variables.
In recent decades, there has been an increased emphasis on, and application of, collaborative and adaptive forms of environmental governance as a means to address complex social-ecological problems that cannot be achieved alone and support sustainable resource management.
Minimizing negative impacts of climate change on human and natural systems requires mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to new climate conditions. Forestry provides grounds to study the relationship between these two concepts: carbon flux and storage are ecosystem services of forests, while forests are growing increasingly vulnerable to climate-driven disturbances.
Historical and contemporary policies and practices, including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of intentional fires ignited by Indigenous peoples, have resulted in over a century of fire exclusion across many of the USA’s landscapes.
The US faces multiple challenges in facilitating the safe, effective, and proactive use of fire as a landscape management tool. This intentional fire use exposes deeply ingrained communication challenges and distinct but overlapping strategies of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire.
The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability.
Despite recent research, a systematic approach to understanding wildfire governance is lacking. This article addresses this deficit by systematically reviewing governance theories and concepts applied so far in the academic literature on wildfires as a step toward achieving their more effective and holistic management.