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.
Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly threatening lives and livelihoods. These growing impacts have prompted a paradigm shift toward proactive wildfire management that prioritizes prevention and preparedness instead of response.
Collaboration is increasingly emphasized as a tool to realize national-level policy goals in public lands management. Yet, collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) are nested within traditional bureaucracies and are affected by internal and external disruptions. The extent to which CGRs adapt and remain resilient to these disruptions remains under-explored.
Costs of fighting wildfires have increased substantially over the past several decades. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of wildfire suppression or how wildfire incident managers prioritize resources threatened within a wildfire incident.
This article outlines an approach for understanding the ways that local social context influences differential community adaptation to wildfire risk. I explain how my approach drew from Wilkinson’s interactional theory of community during various stages of its evolution and describe a series of advancements developed while extending the theory to promote collective action for wildfire.
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.
This literature review synthesizes empirical research about wildland fire communication to provide practitioners, such as land managers, public health and safety officials, community groups, and others working with the public, evidence-based recommendations for communication work.
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.