Wildland–Urban Interface Residents’ Relationships with Wildfire: Variation Within and Across Communities

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

“…Of course, our measure of mitigation is only a coarse estimate of a small subset of possible mitigation actions; future research with a better lens on mitigation actions could uncover additional relationships not observed here. Likewise, evidence from across wildfire social science disciplines urges caution in applying lessons from one context to another [48,[50][51][52][53][54], and we accordingly hope future research will explore the generalizability of these findings beyond our study region. That said, we note that this study encompasses a fairly large dataset covering diverse communities across a six-county region, and the nature of our key findings suggests the importance of considering more sophisticated approaches to modeling relationships among variables such as risk perceptions and mitigation decisions, regardless of the specific context under investigation.…”

“…Reported main results (i.e., those pertaining to CHANCES1, CHANCES2, RA_HIZ, and BP and FIL) are also robust to testing of various alternative combinations of potential covariates and instruments available in the survey data, including adding in demographic variables that were omitted from the main model due to the significant item non-response. Further, because past work demonstrates spatial clustering of many variables from the rapid assessments and household surveys among neighbors [47] and within communities [48], we investigate the robustness of assuming independent and identically distributed errors in our model. Specifically, we estimate a Cliff-Ord spatial autoregressive model with endogenous covariates for each dependent variable, using the STATA command spivreg [49].…”

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

“…The lack of consistency in support for, contribution to, and adaptation of actions designed to encourage wildfire responsibility among private citizens and local governments is due at least in part to the great deal of social diversity-and thus local social context-that exists across fire-prone landscapes [9,20,23,28]. Unique populations of residents living in and influencing the structure of fire-prone landscapes often develop or perpetuate different relationships with natural resources, capacities for managing wildfire risk, perceptions of wildfire benefit, and willingness to work with others.…”

“…Researchers have used the interactional approach to demonstrate how variable adaptation efforts may occur across disperse case studies or communities within the same region (see [20,29,47]). They have also compared case study efforts across the Western U.S. to reveal a set of "archetype communities" which share common patterns of local context characteristics and are likely to approach various adaptation strategies, policies, or incentives in consistent ways.…”

“…Those same populations may be unwilling or unable to adopt adaptation strategies given their existing history with management agencies, attitudes about wildfire, or associated natural resource management, and concerns that regulations will limit their personal freedoms. In sum, longitudinal and cross-comparison studies of human adaptation to wildfire increasingly demonstrate there is no one strategy or set of mitigation actions that will be adopted across all communities [17][18][19][20].…”