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Project ID:

22-2-01-11

Year:

2023

Date Started:

10/01/2022

Date Completed:

Title:

Persist, adapt, or transform: What drives WUI community recovery after wildfires?

Project Proposal Abstract:

Problem Statement: Climate change, increased ignitions, and fuel buildup are driving larger, more frequent, and more severe wildfires. Rapid growth of the wildland urban interface (WUI) further complicates fire management. An estimated one in three homes are now in the WUI, creating increased sources of ignition, difficulty protecting structures, and reduced ability to use fire for risk reduction. WUI fires are causing increasing loss of property, critical infrastructure, and human lives. Many of these communities recover and rebuild in a way that leaves them vulnerable to the next wildfire due to unchanged policies that guide the social, ecological, and built environment recovery. Further, community recovery efforts rarely address the socio-economic inequities that are exacerbated by fire. Thus, the concept of resilience (e.g. bouncing back) can be problematic in coupled social-ecological systems (SES). Concepts of adaptive (changing fundamental characteristics) and transformative (creation of fundamentally new systems) resilience that seek to 'bounce back better' can also be problematic, as they fail to recognize characteristics, such as place attachment and community cohesion, that benefit community members and should be maintained for a community to recover. Thus there is an urgent need to fully understand the underlying ecological and socio-economic conditions that cause WUI communities to stay trapped in a cycle of disaster, respond, rebuild, disaster.

Objectives: To understand these conditions, we propose three tasks: 1) quantify post-fire recovery of vegetation and the built environment in fire-impacted WUI communities, 2) identify the indicators that characterize socio-ecological-built recovery, and 3) examine the ecological, built, and socio-economic trade-offs between post-fire recovery trajectories of persistence, adaptation, and transformation. We hypothesize: 1) that some social community characteristics must be maintained to allow other social and ecological conditions to adapt and transform. These characteristics include tangible and intangible community resources that sustain communities and provide the glue for them to recover from wildfires; and 2) that ecological conditions of WUI communities- particularly fire frequency and severity -influence how social characteristics operate after a fire event and influence long-term recovery. By investigating how social characteristics interact with ecological fire conditions and ownership patterns, we will gain insights on what resources are needed to facilitate transformative recovery while maintaining key social characteristics.

Benefits: A primary benefit from this project will be a comprehensive community resilience trajectory self-assessment guide and learning tool made accessible to the public through an existing web-based platform designed to help WUI community decision-makers, planners, residents, land managers and others visualize ecological, built, and socio-economic indicators of the resilience trajectories. WUI community decision-makers and members will then be able to self-assess what indicators are prevalent in their community. The self-assessment can be shared with others in the community to facilitate discussion of what indicators are important and how to achieve them. Additional outputs will include peer reviewed publications in the natural and social sciences, webinars, and workshops with fire-impacted communities.

Principal Investigator:

Lisa M Ellsworth

Agency/Organization:

Oregon State University

Branch or Dept:

Department of Fisheries & Wildlife

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Co-Principal Investigator	Andres Schmidt	Oregon State University	Department of Fisheries & Wildlife
Co-Principal Investigator	Jenna H Tilt	Oregon State University	College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences