Wildfire experts: Fire must be managed on par with other naturally occurring hazards
One common tool is applicable to the vast array of ecological and social science interactions at the critical wildfire/urban interface: more effective land-use planning, along with the regulations that guide it.
The authors recommend prioritizing location-specific approaches to improve development and safety in fire-prone areas, including:
- Adopting new land-use regulations and zoning guidelines that restrict development in the most fire-prone areas;
- Updating building codes, such as requiring fire-resistant construction to match local hazard levels and encouraging retrofits to existing ignition-prone homes;
- Implementing locally appropriate vegetation management strategies around structures and neighborhoods;
- Evaluating evacuation planning and warning systems, including understanding situations in which mandatory evacuations are or are not effective;
- Developing household and community plans for how to survive stay-and-defend situations;
- Developing better maps of fire hazards, ecosystem services and climate change effects to assess trade-offs between development and hazard.
The release notes that as an example of positive steps, the report cites new fire-danger mapping efforts, including an existing fire hazard severity zone map that guides building codes in California. Produced by the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the current map does not explicitly incorporate locally varying wind patterns, which influence the worst fire-related losses of homes and lives, but future iterations will include these data.
Fire ecology and climate
The authors underscore that wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems and can have a positive long-term influence on the landscape, despite people labeling them as “disasters.” They can stimulate vegetation regeneration, promote a diversity of vegetation types, provide habitat for many species and sustain other ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling.
Around the world, the numbers, sizes, and intensities of fires vary greatly. In some ecosystems, big, severe wildfires are natural events and more climate-driven — by drought or high winds — so fuel reduction is not a very effective tool in these locations. By contrast, many ecosystems that would naturally experience frequent lower-severity fires may respond to vegetation management aimed at both reducing fire hazard to humans and restoring crucial ecosystem processes. The authors agree, however, that where fuel reduction is an appropriate goal, it would ideally be achieved by letting wildfires do their job.
A changing climate will complicate management strategies.
“How should future fire patterns compare to this historical variability? That’s the big question,” Moritz said.
Describing wildfire as “one of the most basic and ongoing natural processes on Earth,” the authors call for a paradigm shift in the way society interacts with it, changing to an approach that achieves long-term, sustainable coexistence that benefits the planet’s ecosystems on the landscape scale, while minimizing catastrophic losses on the human scale.
“A different view of wildfire is urgently needed,” said Moritz. “We must accept wildfire as a crucial and inevitable natural process on many landscapes. There is no alternative. The path we are on will lead to a deepening of our fire-related problems worldwide, which will only become worse as the climate changes.”
— Read more in Max A. Moritz et al., “Learning to coexist with wildfire,” Nature 515 (6 November 2014): 58–66 (doi:10.1038/nature13946)
