Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes

Abstract

Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland-urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. Although many plants, animals, and ecosystem services benefit from fire, it is unknown how ecosystems will respond to increased burning and warming. Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed. Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire. These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildlandurban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire.wildfire | resilience | forests | wildland-urban interface | policy

Historical Fire Regimes in Ponderosa Pine and Mixed-Conifer Landscapes of the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, USA, from Multiple Sources

“…It is not easy to restore and live with dangerous, but ecologically important large, severe fires or even with low-severity fires [48]. New landscape-scale evidence shows that montane landscapes are among the most inherently dangerous places to try to live with fire in the San Juan Mountains.…”

Where you stand depends on where you sit: qualitative inquiry into notions of fire adaptation

“…Indeed, the history of fire exclusion for the sake of public safety resulted in significantly altered ecological functions and conditions, which subsequently exacerbated threats and potential disruption to the social system (USDA and USDI 2014). While the ecological impacts are not uniform (Parisien et al 2012, Mortiz et al 2014) and fuel treatments must reflect this variation (Schoennagel et al 2017), the largely successful control of fire has played an important role in shaping social assumptions about the place of fire on the landscape and in WUI communities. Assumptions about the place of fire on the landscape may not be specifically articulated; however, continued increases in fire suppression expenditures (Gude et al 2013, USFS 2015 provide a clear signal to society that organizations are committed to preventing and suppressing wildfire events.…”

“…Solutions to this dilemma, including a shift toward "fire adaptation" and "fire-adapted communities," suggest opportunities for paradigmatic shifts in how wildland fire is understood and managed , Schoennagel et al 2017. The power to sculpt narratives is not shared evenly across society, and some stakeholders have more power and opportunity to engage in processes by which a societal problem and its solutions are defined and set in motion (Spector and Kitsuse 1987).…”

“…As such, focus on fire adaptation seeks to reduce the unintended and exacerbated threats to human lives and values, and the escalating costs that result from fire suppression (Busenburg 2004, Mortiz et al 2014, USFS 2015. This shift from an almost complete focus on suppression reflects evolving understandings of wildfire (Allen and Gould 1986, Carroll et al 2007, Hammer et al 2009, Lockwood 2010, Schoennagel et al 2017, which also emphasize addressing climate change-related effects on forest conditions and wildfire behavior (Jolly et al 2015), and demographic shifts that exacerbate risk to lives and values at risk in the expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI) (Westerling et al 2006, Stephens et al 2013, Rasker 2015, Knorr et al 2016. The policy explicitly recognizes the unsustainability of the wildfire suppression approach .…”

Extreme wildfire events are linked to global-change-type droughts in the northern Mediterranean

“…There is increasing evidence that global changes are altering the distribution and frequency of the largest, most destructive extreme wildfires events (EWE) in different regions of the world (Trigo et al, 2006;Bowman et al, 2017) with ensuing economic, social and ecological impacts (Schoennagel et al, 2017). In a large number of ecosystems, anthropogenic ignitions are dominant and dead or live biomass is rarely limiting (Krawchuk et al, 2009;Pausas and Fernández-Muñoz, 2012).…”