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Project ID:

25-2-01-3

Year:

2025

Date Started:

12/01/2025

Date Completed:

Title:

Increasing Oregonians' resilience to wildfires across alternative futures

Project Proposal Abstract:

Proposal purpose and objectives. Oregon’s administrative rules include protecting people and property from natural hazards. Mitigation of wildfire hazard in a given location generally responds to past and current threats and opportunities. As a result, mitigation is not optimized to provide future resilience. To address this issue, we will test how social, technological, economic, environmental, political, and legislative change may affect the future geography of wildfire hazard. Our objective is to identify realistic land-use and other risk-reduction policies that likely will reduce potential harms from wildfire across alternative plausible futures. Through a partnership between researchers and the state agency charged with addressing public land-use needs, and in collaboration with many other agencies and organizations, we aim to inform iterative selection of actions and locations for wildfire risk reduction. We also aim to catalyze a vision of resilience to wildfire that is shared by public and private entities and is robust to uncertainties in regional and global trends.

Activities to be performed. To ensure that our work is collaborative, transparent, and repeatable, we will apply strategic foresight. Strategic foresight deliberately explores plausible future developments that are at the margins of current thinking and planning on any topic. We will convene researchers, planners, and managers from multiple agencies and organizations as participants. We then will use the strategic foresight methods of horizon scanning and driver mapping to identify and rank the influence of emerging causes of changes in wildfire hazards. We will incorporate the strongest drivers into alternative future scenarios of wildfire hazard, and model how each scenario will change the distribution of sector-based risks. The group then will stress-test realistic policy options against the scenarios to identify policies that are most likely to reduce potential harms from wildfires over the next 20 years.

Expected deliverables. As required by JFSP, we will submit annual narrative and financial project summaries. We will upload an abstract of the final report, and a final report that includes a comprehensive project summary and metadata, to the JFSP database. We will archive all derived data and metadata within six months of project completion, and make narrative and visual projections of hazard values publicly available online. In partnership with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium, we will develop fact sheets, research briefs and remote, interactive briefings on our methods and results. We also expect to submit one or more manuscripts to peer-reviewed scientific journals and delivering presentations to research-management partnerships.

Benefits. The proposed research is consistent with Exective Order 14239, “Achieving efficiency through state and local preparedness.” Our work will increase Oregon’s capacity for preparedness at state and local levels and inform local decisions, infrastructure prioritization, and investments designed to address risks posed by wildfires. Our research will benefit the government by applying rigorous science to reduce wildfire hazard and potential harms given uncertainty about future conditions; engaging government and other end users throughout the project; and translating and disseminating results through the JFSP Fire Science Exchange Network, Cooperative Extension, and state resilience activities. The project will advance the goals of federal natural hazard mitigation planning; the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy; and Oregon’s Statewide Land Use Planning Goals and wildfire preparedness and resilience mandates. The research will benefit the public by informing policies that reduce wildfire hazard and potential harms from wildfires. The work further will benefit the public by complementing federal and state hazard mitigation programs that increase resilience to wildfire.

Principal Investigator:

Erica Fleishman

Agency/Organization:

Oregon State University

Branch or Dept:

College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences

Other Project Collaborators

Type	Name	Agency/Organization	Branch or Dept
Agreements Contact	Vickie Y Watkins	Oregon State University	Office of Sponsored Programs
Budget Contact	Liana Ryan	Oregon State University	Office of Sponsored Programs