Social and Community Impacts of Fire

The increased global frequency and scale of impactful and destructive wildfires has necessitated the reimagination of recovery assistance in affected communities. Unequal experience with and access to resources to support recovery mean that organizations operating at different scales may provide varying types of assistance after fire, particularly in rural areas.

Climate change is impacting ecosystems in dynamic ways. In order to mitigate the risks brought about by these ecosystem changes, ecosystem management, which has historically focused on preservation and preventing change, must now be much more flexible and responsive.

Indigenous fire stewardship enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads. Although Indigenous Peoples have maintained fire stewardship practices for millennia and continue to be keepers of fire knowledge, significant barriers exist for re-engaging in cultural burning.

Wildland fire is a common occurrence in western Canada, with record-setting area burned recorded in British Columbia (BC) in the past decade. Here, we used the unsupervised machine learning algorithm HDBSCAN to identify high-density clusters of both human- and lightning- caused wildfire ignitions in BC using data from 2006 to 2020.

  Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and effects of cultural burning in this region within an ecosystem services framework.

Over millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America’s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today.

In 2019, Colorado State University entered into achallenge cost-share agreement with USFS Stateand Private Forestry to conduct independent researchon the implementation and developmentof Shared Stewardship efforts.

The recovery requires an “all-hands-on-deck” approach to meet people where they are, assesstheir needs, and work collaboratively for the best solutions in each community. In addition, it willbe critical to listen to individuals in communities to gain a deep understanding of barriers andneeds.

As the need for wildfire adaptation for human populations in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) intensifies in the face of changes that have increased the number of wildfires that exceed 100 thousand acres, it is becoming more important to come to a better understanding of social complexity on the WUI landscape.

The revitalization of cultural burning is a priority for many Native American tribes and for agencies and organizations that recognize the cultural and ecological importance of this practice.