Wildfire is among the most destructive natural hazards affecting communities in North America, and particularly in the western United States. Climate change is exacerbating the problem, creating conditions that favor increased frequency and severity of burns, while continued urbanization and prevailing development patterns increase the population and extent of the built environment in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Though wildfire risk is growing in many regions, the issue is currently most pronounced in California; between 2003 and 2021, the ten costliest wildland fires in the U.S all occurred in that state, and one in four Californians lives in an area considered high-risk for wildfires. The real and growing threat of wildfire, particularly in the WUI, necessitates effective mitigation- and resilience-oriented community planning.
At the same time, communities are increasingly producing many different types of plans to guide their land use and development decisions. In California, a typical jurisdiction’s network of plans includes a General (Comprehensive) Plan, a Hazard Mitigation Plan, a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, and potentially many additional sectoral or small area plans. While the local planning department may lead development of some plans, others are produced by various “siloed” agencies and groups within and outside government, and integration is often lacking. This is especially true with regard to hazards, and in particular fire hazards in the WUI which, in California, are addressed by several agencies and plans but without sufficient collaboration, integration, or spatial understanding.
To address this dilemma, we are applying the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS) method in partnership with several California jurisdictions that are subject to wildfire hazards. Originally developed with a focus on flooding, the PIRS™ method enables the spatial evaluation of a community’s network of plans to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to hazards. The process aims to harmonize a community’s network of plans by systematically assessing policies and facilitating their adjustment to improve the focus and coordination of plans on building resilience in the most vulnerable locations.
Preliminary results indicated that the PIRS™ method is generalizable to wildfire hazards with small methodological and contextual modifications. Wildland fire in the WUI presents a special challenge, however, in that the hazard itself stems from the dynamics of fuel variables (natural and built) interacting with climate and human variables. Added complexities notwithstanding, the development and application of a wildfire-hazard-focused PIRS™ supported by a spatial framework enables an understanding of the heterogeneous effects of policy across a community, including the identification of policies that support resilience and those that conflict with a risk reduction strategy. The multidisciplinary project team is composed of faculty and affiliates from the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo WUI Fire Institute and the Texas A&M University Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. The two-year project, supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, involves collaboration with four California communities to develop and test the new PIRS™ for Wildfire methodology.
