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 recommended by the Fire Adapted Communities program.

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 vulnerability in these assessments and plans.

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.

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?

Whether ignited by lightning or by Native Americans, fire once shaped many North American ecosystems.

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.

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

Community-based organizations (CBOs) in Oregon are fostering natural resource management and economic development, particularly in public lands communities where the capacity of federal agencies, businesses, and others has dwindled. They have also become integral in reducing social conflict over land management and seeking community economic wellbeing.

The purpose of this report is to propose principles and strategies for creating socioeconomic performance measures, as well as identify potential measures that could be integrated into the WCF and other restoration frameworks in the short term.

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 trusted sources of information about fire? 3.