Social-Ecological Consequences of Future Wildfires and Smoke in the West: Proceedings of a Workshop (2024)
Chapter: 1 Introduction
1
Introduction
Across western North America, changes in climate, land cover, and population dynamics are reshaping wildfire dynamics, setting the stage for a new era of fire management. Wildfires are more frequent in the eastern and central states, but those in the West, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, tend to be larger and cover more acreage,1 posing significant challenges to prediction and response. The number of wildfires in Canada in 2024, as of July 17, was highest in the provinces of Alberta (850 wildfires) and British Colombia (521 wildfires).2 These two provinces also saw the highest number of wildfires on a 10-year average compared with other provinces in Canada.3
Wildfires may be defined as “unplanned fires, including lightning-caused fires, unauthorized human-caused fires, and escaped fires from prescribed burn projects.”4 While they can have beneficial effects on certain ecological resources, they can also cause significant damage, particularly to communities, including First Nations, impacted by wildfire activity.
Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of these fires.5 Future projections highlight heightened wildfire risks in rural communities and the expanding wildland-urban interface. Mitigating climate change’s worst impacts is possible, but it demands swift, substantial changes. As the projected trends evolve, preparing society for effective wildfire management becomes increasingly urgent, demanding innovative strategies amidst evolving conditions.
Therefore, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies) partnered with the Royal Society of Canada to convene an ad hoc planning committee, the Planning Committee on the Social-Ecological Consequences of Future Wildfires in the West, to organize a hybrid workshop to address these challenges. The planning committee explored the future climatic, social, and ecological drivers of wildfire in the
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1 Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Gershunov, A., Guzman-Morales, J., Bishop, D. A., Balch, J. K., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2019). Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in California. Earth’s Future, 7, 892–910.
2 These statistics and more details about wildfire frequency in Canada are available at: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/report/graphs
3 Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Gershunov, A., Guzman-Morales, J., Bishop, D. A., Balch, J. K., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2019). Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in California. Earth’s Future, 7, 892–910.
4 Congressional Research Service. (2023, June 1). Wildfire statistics. In Focus. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244
5 Williams, A. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., Gershunov, A., Guzman-Morales, J., Bishop, D. A., Balch, J. K., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2019). Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in California. Earth’s Future, 7, 892–910.
western regions of the United States and Canada. This effort was coordinated by the National Academies Board on Environmental Change and Society6 in collaboration with the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources.7
As stipulated in the planning committee’s charge (shown in Box 1-1), the workshop was about understanding and responding to increasing fire size, severity, and frequency. It focused on binational policy and practice considerations, research and data needs, and community engagement strategies to identify gaps in knowledge and what disciplines must work together to fill those gaps.
The workshop convened experts across academia, industry, and government, including representatives of fire-impacted communities, to discuss the state of the art of wildfire resilience and adaptation and the future challenges and needs in this context. Committee expertise included social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences, economics, environmental and ecological sciences, forestry, fire management, hydrology, land use planning, demography, future scenarios, risk, infrastructure, Indigenous knowledge, social-ecological systems, public health, community well-being, sustainability, and law and policy.
This proceedings has been prepared by the workshop rapporteur as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The planning committee’s role was limited to planning and convening the workshop. The views contained in the proceedings are those of individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all workshop participants, the planning committee, or the National Academies. The workshop agenda and biographical sketches of the committee members and presenters are presented in Appendixes A and B.8
OPENING COMMENTS
Jonathan Fink, the committee chair and a professor at Portland State University, and John Ben Soileau, program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, welcomed everyone and thanked the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for sponsoring the workshop. Fink started out with a land acknowledgment to the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples of the land on which the National Academies facilities stand in Irvine, California,9 and by thanking the Royal Society of Canada for collaborating on the workshop.
Fink then described how the committee had been tasked with examining the future climatological, social, and ecological consequences of wildfires in the western United States and Canada, where wildfires are increasing in size, severity, and frequency, leading to accelerating societal costs. Fink explained that the workshop was designed to address the ecological and human dimensions of wildfires across three critical timescales: the present, the next decade, and the next three decades. The workshop has been structured to examine policy implications, research needs, and community engagement strategies.
Acknowledging the existence of multiple definitions for the word “wildfire,” to set the stage Fink pointed out that the Planning Committee’s working definition refers to uncontrolled fires that “burn in the natural environment, regardless of their potential interaction with the built environment. Wildfires can start in the natural environment and transition to the built environment, or begin in the built environment and transition to the wildlands.”10
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6 More information about the Board on Environmental Change and Society is available at https://www.nationalacademies.org/becs/board-on-environmental-change-and-society
7 More information about the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources is available at https://www.nationalacademies.org/banr/about
8 The workshop video and presenter presentations are available at https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/42562_06-2024_the-social-ecological-consequences-of-future-wildfire-in-the-west-a-workshop. During lunch on the first day of the workshop, a film by Irene Lusztig, Contents Inventory, was shown; it can be watched at https://vimeo.com/561627771/0830d7cab1
9 More information about the importance of land, and maps of Indigenous lands, to change, challenge, and improve how people see history and present day are available at https://native-land.ca/
10 Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission (2023, September). ON FIRE: The report of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/wfmmc-final-report-09-2023.pdf
BOX 1-1
Statement of Task
A planning committee of the National Academies will organize and convene a workshop on the future climate and social-ecological drivers and consequences of wildfire in the western region of the United States and Canada. Wildfires and their impacts on human health, property, and systems are increasing precipitously in much of the region, with cumulative, compounding and cascading effects that multiply their costs to society. The workshop will consider the present, “immediate future” (next decade), and “near-term future” (mid-century) as critical timescales for addressing the human dimensions of wildfires. In particular, the workshop will focus on understanding and responding to a trajectory of increasing fire size, severity, frequency, and synchronicity in western North America that has been underway since the 1970s.
Key questions include:
- To what extent will current fire science, fire management, and public understanding be able to address fire conditions in the future? Are landowners, management organizations, and communities adequately preparing for increasing wildfire and considering climate adaptation strategies that address non-stationary and no-analog conditions?
- What are the full costs of current wildfires from the pre-fire treatments to fire-fighting efforts and ecological, health, and infrastructure damages during fire to the long-term costs related to social-economic recovery and management response? How will those costs likely change in the future?
- What are the consequences of future wildfires on rural, overburdened, and marginalized communities that may already have low levels of healthcare, higher co-morbidities, and few available resources?
- What are critical information gaps within the social, health, and ecological sciences that need to be addressed to improve future wildfire response planning (i.e., fire management system, research needs, data needs, modeling, and technological needs)?
- What is the role for behavioral and decision sciences, applied to fire management organizations and their approaches, communities, and individuals in fire-prone areas, individual homeowner/resident decisions, and public communication of wildfire risk and response?
The public workshop will focus on policy/practice considerations, research/data needs, and community engagement strategies. It will also seek to identify gaps in knowledge, the value of filling those gaps, strategies for doing so, and what disciplines must work together.
A proceedings of the workshop describing the presentations and discussions will be produced by a designated rapporteur in accordance with institutional guidelines
This workshop is joint with the Royal Society of Canada whose aim is to connect and integrate expertise on wildfires across the international North American West.
COMMENTS FROM THE GORDON AND BETTY MOORE FOUNDATION
Representing the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation team, Genevieve Biggs, program director for the Wildfire Resilience Initiative and Special Projects, emphasized that wildfires are not just a professional concern—they impact people’s personal lives as well. Discussing her experience as someone who lives just north of San Francisco, she said her family regularly experiences the effects of wildfires and smoke. This type of experience, she pointed out, is shared by increasingly large numbers of people across the United States, Canada, and all around the world. The impressive roster of workshop participants, Biggs noted, highlights the potential power resulting from people coming together to tackle this daunting challenge. Collective expertise and interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral thinking are vital to not only addressing the significant challenges ahead but also charting a resilient path forward.
She expressed thanks to Stephen Pyne, the keynote speaker on the first day of the workshop, whose groundbreaking work has profoundly influenced the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The foundation, established over 20 years ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty, aims to promote positive outcomes for future generations. Dedicated to advancing scientific discovery and conserving ecosystem function and integrity, the foundation tackles major global challenges. Harvey Fineberg, its president, often emphasizes that the foundation seeks both to safeguard what is good in the world through environmental conservation as well as to pave the way for progress through science. Gordon Moore encouraged proactive solutions leading to wins in the environmental arena.
Engagement with wildfires is central to the Moore Foundation’s mission. Recently, its Wildfire Resilience Initiative convened grantees to explore possible tools and approaches for managing present and future fires. The grantees not only addressed who will bear future wildfire impacts but also developed community and watershed-scale solutions to mitigate severe social and ecological consequences. Attendees spanned many diverse backgrounds, to include fire service officials, academicians, tribal representatives, and land managers. At the end of the meeting, facilitators asked for participants’ feelings to be expressed in just one or two words. Marion Wittmann, a program officer at the Moore Foundation, chose the word “uncertainty”—stressing that she meant this not in a negative sense but to emphasize the critical role of science in problem-solving. Understanding and communicating uncertainty, Whitmann said, helps identify knowledge gaps, could spur research, and potentially enhances an understanding of social and ecological systems. Biggs said their goal is to promote fire-adapted ecosystems and resilient fire-prone communities.11
The Moore Foundation is working to gather new insights and form partnerships to fill these gaps. Indigenous knowledge enriches our shared understanding of fire’s role in the ecosystem, and the concept of ecologically beneficial fire is helping inform ecosystem health and resilience, Biggs explained. Amid uncertainty, she finds hope for a vision of the future where the idea of “beneficial fire” predominates by nourishing healthy ecosystems. Looking ahead to 2035, the Moore Foundation aims to establish models for healthy, fire-adapted ecosystems as well as resilient communities. Their grantees’ projects are designed to achieve these outcomes, driving progress toward achieving their long-term vision.
In closing, Biggs shared a quote from Stephen Pyne: “Fire is not simply a tool, a presence, or process for us to manipulate, but a relationship.” She said she was grateful for the opportunity to build upon existing knowledge and, by so doing, to explore “uncertainties” with the aim being to improve that relationship with fire.
ORGANIZATION OF THE PROCEEDINGS
The hybrid workshop held on June 13–14, 2024, featured invited presentations and discussions involving researchers, practitioners, representatives from fire-impacted communities, and other stakeholders. The chapters that follow are organized to reflect the presentations at the workshop.
The keynote address, presented in Chapter 2, delves into the intricate relationships between wildfires and human communities in the western region of the United States and Canada. It provides a comprehensive overview spanning historical contexts, contemporary perceptions, and the future implications of wildfires. By exploring these interconnected dimensions, the address aims to illuminate how wildfires have not only shaped but also continue to influence the landscapes, cultures, and livelihoods of communities in the West. Three respondents to the address, all members of the Board on Environmental Change and Society (BECS), each commented on the keynote from different perspectives.
Chapter 3 summarizes the panel that followed the keynote. The chapter lays out a broad, evidence-based foundation for understanding the relationship between wildfires and human communities in the West. It examines this relationship from various perspectives—including climatological, ecological, and social—within the historical context. Further, it makes projections for the future, and considers their implications, based on increases in wildfire size, severity, frequency, and synchronicity.
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11 More information about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative is available at https://www.moore.org/wildfire
Chapter 4 summarizes the second panel, which outlined the projected multifaceted social-ecological consequences of future wildfires, highlighting impacts on various types of communities, including rural, overburdened, and marginalized groups. The chapter explores these consequences across different geographic scales (e.g., rural, wildland-urban interface) by examining how disparities in healthcare, comorbidity, and resource access exacerbate vulnerabilities.
Chapter 5 showcases wildfire case studies, bringing together workshop participants’ perspectives by grounding them in real-world experiences. These case studies highlight diverse impacts on communities, illustrating the complexities of wildfire management and the resilience of at-risk and impacted communities.
The last session of the workshop’s first day is treated in Chapter 6, which focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to identifying and discussing critical knowledge gaps in the social-ecological understanding of wildfire consequences in the West. Shifting from the earlier sessions’ emphasis on existing knowledge, the speakers highlighted areas where an evidence-based understanding needed to inform future research and policy development is still lacking.
The workshop’s first day concluded with a comprehensive summary and closing remarks, contained in Chapter 7. Highlighted here are session-based insights emphasizing the interdisciplinary understanding of a wildfire’s social-ecological consequences.
The keynote address at the beginning of the second day was about “over the horizon” challenges and associated research needs with regard to understanding the social-ecological challenges of future wildfires. It is presented in Chapter 8 and covers such issues as vulnerability, coping capacity, and resilience.
Chapter 9 gives voice to the firsthand perspectives and experiences of people in communities affected by wildfires, including outdoor workers, migrant workers, and the elderly. Through their stories, the workshop session aimed to develop a preliminary inventory of shared community needs and knowledge gaps. By making these needs and knowledge gaps better known to researchers, it is hoped that the voices of those most affected will be central to future discussions.
Fire technologies designed to enhance social resilience to wildfires were the focus of the next workshop session, covered in Chapter 10. Panelists described various systems, technologies, and innovations, including advanced risk communication tools, effective wildfire prevention strategies, and efficient evacuation processes. By highlighting these technological advancements, the chapter provides insights into how communities can better prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfire events.
The last session, covered in Chapter 11, identified critical needs in terms of policy, funding, and action that will be required in order to address the social-ecological consequences of wildfires in the West. The chapter focuses on areas such as mitigation strategies, insurance solutions, community engagement, and the enhancement of evaluation and metric capabilities. Examining these needs across local, national, and binational scales, it addresses the work that will be required in the social-ecological dimensions to achieve more effective wildfire management and resilience building.
Chapter 12 summarizes a wrap-up discussion that identified the key themes and insights from the workshop. Sharing their input, reflections, and questions during this activity, workshop panelists and audience members participated in an interactive discussion that not only helped to consolidate what had been learned during the workshop but also helped identify future directions.
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