Edible fire buffers: Mitigation of wildfire with multifunctional landscapes

Abstract

Wildfires ravage lands in seasonally dry regions, imposing high costs on infrastructure maintenance and human habitation at the wildland–urban interface. Current fire mitigation approaches present upfront costs with uncertain long-term payoffs. We show that a new landscape intervention on human-managed wildlands—buffers of a low-flammability crop species such as banana irrigated using recycled water—can mitigate wildfires and produce food profitably. This new intervention can complement existing fire mitigation approaches. Recreating a recent, major fire in simulation, we find that a medium-sized (633 m) banana buffer decreases fireline intensity by 96%, similar to the combination of prescribed burns and mechanical thinning, and delays the fire by 316 min, enabling safer and more effective firefighting. We find that under climate change, despite worsened fires, banana buffers will still have a protective effect. We also find that banana buffers with average yield could produce a profit of $56k USD/hectare through fruit sales, in addition to fire mitigation.