Race and Wildfire Risk Perceptions among Rural Forestland Owners in North-Central Florida

Abstract

The southern United States is susceptible to wildfire, from its climate, growing seasons, lightning frequency, and decades of fire suppression. With much known about wildfire's biophysical risks, less is understood about sociodemographic obstacles, including race, income, and education. Blacks in the rural southeastern United States are typically among the most marginalized Americans and least likely to have sufficient knowledge about resource protection. Because disaster preparedness has been shown to vary by sociodemographic status and race, this study focused on race and wildfire prevention by rural forestland owners in north-central Florida. Results show that while Whites were more aware of existing resources, they were less likely to incorporate preventative measures. In contrast, Blacks earned lower incomes and utilized their land less, but were more likely to manage and live on their land. We conclude that wildfire mitigation programs may be more effective when they work to connect absentee rural land owners to their land.

Objective and perceived wildfire risk and its influence on private forest landowners’ fuel reduction activities in Oregon’s (USA) ponderosa pine ecoregion

“…Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics have been associated with mitigation behaviour among homeowners in some cases, including residential status and length of tenure (Bright and Burtz 2006;Collins 2008;Jarrett et al 2009;Fischer 2011), but not all (Schulte and Miller 2010;Wyman et al 2012). Findings about the influence of income, age and sex have also been mixed (Collins 2008;Martin et al 2009;Wyman et al 2012).…”

“…Risk perception is often correlated with mitigation behaviour among both homeowners (McCaffrey 2002;Nelson et al 2004;Martin et al 2009) and private forest landowners (Jarrett et al 2009;Fischer 2011;Fischer and Charnley 2012), but not always (Nelson et al 2005;Hall and Slothower 2009). Direct experience with fire conceivably might leave individuals more aware of wildfire risk, but evidence of its influence on mitigation behaviour is mixed, with some studies suggesting little influence (Hall and Slothower 2009;Martin et al 2009;Schulte and Miller 2010;Wyman et al 2012) and others suggesting some influence (Jarrett et al 2009;Fischer and Charnley 2012). Perceptions of mitigation effectiveness and perceptions of one's own ability to conduct mitigation activities have also been correlated with fuel reduction among homeowners (Nelson et al 2004;Martin et al 2007;Hall and Slothower 2009;Martin et al 2009;McFarlane et al 2011).…”

“…Most studies of wildfire risk reduction activities among private landowners have focussed on residential homeowners using qualitative case studies. Only a handful of papers have used quantitative methods to address factors that influence fuel reduction activities of private forest landowners (Jarrett et al 2009;Fischer 2011;Fischer and Charnley 2012;Wyman et al 2012) and none that we are aware of have addressed objective factors.…”

Community Wildfire Preparedness: a Global State-of-the-Knowledge Summary of Social Science Research

“…In the past five years, published work in this area has continued to explore the factors that encourage private land owners to undertake mitigation actions and is still primarily focused on homeowners in the USA [4][5][6][7][8][9], although a few articles examined the topic in relation to Canadian homeowners [10] or larger-scale, non-industrial, private landowners [11,12]. Australian work focusing on mitigation on private lands has tended to examine the topic in relation to homeowners' planned responses during a fire [13,14].…”

An Exploration ofAfricanAmerican Forest Landowners inMississippi

“…The authors suggested that since members of minorities in the study tended to make less income than white NIPF owners, they were more likely to harvest timber (also see Alig, Lee, and Moulton ; Wyman et al. ). Gan et al.…”