Assessing influences on social vulnerability to wildfire using surveys, spatial data and wildfire simulations

Social vulnerability to large wildfires in the western USA

“…We used the US Census Bureau for the American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates for the period 2011-2015 to select 21 social attributes (Table 1) to capture the level of resilience to wildfires at the scale of US block groups and communities (Cutter et al, 2003;Davies et al, 2018;Flanagan, Gregory, Hallisey, Heitgerd, & Lewis, 2011;Fothergill, 1996;Peacock, Morrow, & Gladwin, 1997;Wigtil et al, 2016;Wright, Rossi, Pereira, & Weber-Burdin, 2012). Social conditions, including wealth, poverty, race and age can often influence wildfire preparation and mitigation (Nielsen-Pincus, Ribe, & Johnson, 2015;Paveglio, Brenkert-Smith, Hall, & Smith, 2015;Paveglio et al, 2018;Wigtil et al, 2016). These social attributes are linked with social vulnerability to wildfires and describe a community's: capability to quickly react to and escape from an emergency (e.g., too young or too old, lack of vehicle, disability and single-parent households); ability to absorb losses and enhance resilience to hazard impacts (e.g., poverty, income and education); diversity (e.g., minority status, poor ability to speak English); housing status and affordability (e.g., multi-family residential units, manufactured homes, overcrowding in housing, and group quarters); and predominant occupations (natural resources, service, and government jobs, unemployment rates).…”

“…Homeowners with insufficient income have potentially lower capacity to conduct wildfire hazard mitigation efforts (Brenkert- Smith, Champ, & Flores, 2012). On the other hand, Paveglio et al (2018) found that higher income correlated with increased sensitivity and overall risk, and higher-value homes were at higher risk to wildfire exposure. Age is also an influencing factor that, along with financial ability, defines the willingness and ability of a community to accomplish wildfire mitigation actions (Olsen et al, 2017).…”

“…The extensive literature on social science related to wildfire issues (McCaffrey, 2015) has studied risk perception, mitigation decisions and perceived consequences (Champ & Brenkert-Smith, 2016;Champ, Donovan, & Barth, 2013;Dickinson, Brenkert-Smith, Champ, & Flores, 2015;Gordon, Luloff, & Stedman, 2012); community pre-fire mitigation (Cohn, Williams, & Carroll, 2008) and adaptive capacity ; residents' actions and adaptation (Brenkert- Smith, 2006); and community social diversity and vulnerability (Paveglio, Nielsen-Pincus, Abrams, & Moseley, 2017;Paveglio, Prato, Edgeley, & Nalle, 2016). However, work to assess wildfire risk by integrating social and natural systems is relatively new (Cutter, Boruff, & Shirley, 2003;Davies et al, 2018;Gaither, Goodrick, Murphy, & Poudyal, 2015;Gaither et al, 2011;Oliveira, Zêzere, Queirós, & Pereira, 2017;Parisien et al, 2016;Wigtil et al, 2016) or applied at limited geographic scales (Fischer, Kline, Ager, Charnley, & Olsen, 2014;Nielsen-Pincus et al, In review;Olsen, Kline, Ager, Olsen, & Short, 2017;Paveglio, Edgeley, & Stasiewicz, 2018;Paveglio et al, 2016), leaving a gap in our knowledge about large-scale transboundary risk in relation to behavioral response to fire. Our first goal is to understand where transboundary large fire events originate and how they spread through a mosaic of land tenures, management jurisdictions and fuel models, and quantify their impacts on the communities of three socially and biophysically distinct fire-prone regions of the western US.…”

Interactions between Resident Risk Perceptions and Wildfire Risk Mitigation: Evidence from Simultaneous Equations Modeling

“…Nagle argues that this endogeneity may bias estimates of perceived risk in models of mitigation behavior, thereby potentially explaining previous results that failed to find a significant effect. Finally, Paveglio et al [33] estimate risk as a function of burn probability, self-reported fuel reduction activities, and sensitivity to potential financial losses. They find that self-reported parcel-level characteristics better explain the variability in wildfire exposure, sensitivity, and overall risk from wildfire in their sample than do variables on sociodemographics and risk perceptions.…”

Exploring the Influence of Local Social Context on Strategies for Achieving Fire Adapted Communities

“…Segments of existing research suggest that certain elements of local context might not be fully captured using only demographic variables. This realization is challenging given that one predominant approach for integrating wildfire social science into management revolves around predicting, assigning, or generalizing lessons about influences on adaptive capacity using secondary or remotely obtained data (see [8,25,78,79]). Alternative perspectives suggest that local context is perhaps most actionable and illustrative when it is understood and presented as a narrative set of conditions that define a given community.…”