Rethinking Risk and Responsibility in the Western Wildfire Crisis

(Photo by iStock/Attila Adam)

The western United States is beginning to come to grips with the potential magnitude of the wildfire crisis. Increases in forest wildfire size, severity, and elevation have been linked to a 30-year pattern of increasing fuels in coniferous forests. Wildfire management is made even more challenging by changes in climate that have extended the fire season and increased the frequency of days that promote extreme wildfire (i.e., hot late dry season days with strong winds). 

Recent media coverage of several large and deadly fires, alongside the federal and state wildlands management response, have focused public concern toward wildfire risks on public lands, and in particular coniferous forested lands. The US Forest Service, for example, has been frequently maligned for not better managing forest fuels on their mostly forested land. California has developed a Wildfire and Forest Resilience Plan that invests heavily in forest management in an effort to reduce fuels in coniferous forests.

Clearly there is broad consensus that society should manage wildlands to avoid severe wildfire impacts. But how else should a society invest in risk reduction? What are the primary drivers of risk? Where are the dominant impacts we are trying to avoid? What are our primary objectives in managing wildfire? How do we create social change to meet those objectives? These are serious questions that we often get wrong because of our laser focus on public lands forests.

Where Are Wildfire Challenges Most Severe?

Wildland fire risk management has focused on fuels reduction on public lands by thinning and removing fuels from dense coniferous forests. The ecological justification is that reduced timber harvest and fire suppression has led these forests to be “overdense” relative to their historic state, creating the capacity for severe wildfire. The benefit is that reducing fuels does reduce the risk of extreme wildfire. This, in turn, reduces the risk of hazardous smoke exposure for Californians.

The problem with our fascination with this approach is threefold. First, the western ecosystems experiencing increased wildfire (grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, and coniferous forests) are all fire-maintained. We not only expect them to burn, but, in many cases, we need them to burn in order to maintain their ecosystem goods and services. Second, we know from recent studies that most wildfires are caused by humans and spread from private lands to public lands. Third, we know that coniferous forests are, in fact, under-represented in the number of ignitions, burned area, lives lost, and homes damaged relative to the open woodland, shrublands, and grasslands of the region.  Finally, we know that most of the highly damaging fires are wind-driven, not fuels driven; to more effectively reduce wildfire risk we would need to manage wind, not fuels.

The November 2018 Camp Fire, as an example, was ignited by a faulty electrical line and traveled rapidly under high winds through mostly lightly forested land to reach the heavily forested town of Paradise. Once in town, both houses and trees were quickly ablaze. The October 2017 Tubbs Fire began in shrublands from powerline and transformer failures. The fire spread rapidly under high winds across grasslands to enter the city of Santa Rosa. These two fires alone destroyed over 20,000 buildings, caused billions of dollars of damage, and cost more than 100 people their lives. Neither of these fires were in locations where we would have managed fuels because woody fuel loads were already low or non-existent.

Most of the concern (aside from smoke exposure) about the wildfire crisis is driven by the rapid increase in the number of US residents who live in rural communities in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), which has placed millions more people at wildfire risk. Further, climate models suggest that the likelihood for rapidly moving fire is increasing owing to patterns of delayed fall precipitation. Specifically, high wind events in the western United States are concentrated in the autumn. In turn, autumn weather has become warmer and drier, leading to an extension of the fire season into the windy season. Collectively, these observations lead to three fairly straightforward, albeit unpleasant, conclusions about where society should invest in wildfire management solutions.

First, wildfire will continue to be a societal issue whether or not fuels reduction in coniferous forests succeeds in reducing fire severity on public lands. In August of 2020, a highly unusual lightning storm ignited over 650 fires in California within a few hours. These eventually coalesced and burned over one million acres. In this case, however, those lightning fires ignited mostly on public lands. And, when the August Complex was over, fewer than 1,000 buildings were fire damaged and just one life was lost. To be clear, this fire created a tremendous amount of smoke, to the detriment of human health. My argument is not that fuels reduction in coniferous forests won’t help resolve several components of the wildfire crisis. It will. However, forest fuels management reduction strategies are painstakingly slow. It is estimated that more than 20 million acres need treatment in California alone, and state and federal agencies are targeting an aspirational goal of reaching one million acres per year. With repeated treatment needed, this process will take time.

Second, there is no vegetation management solution for the ecosystems where wildfire is most prevalent and most damaging. Open woodland, grassland, and shrubland systems will catch fire and burn. Fuels within these ecosystems recover within one to five years, allowing them to burn again. Further, fires moving through these ecosystems characterized by light, highly flammable fuels can move very rapidly under high winds. Climate models suggest an increased capacity for late season fires, when strong winds are more prevalent.

Finally, solutions for wildfire damage control are highly dependent on people and their behaviors. The western US has allowed, even encouraged, people to move into incredibly risky environments and not required adequate risk reduction protections. Population growth in rural communities in the WUI escalates wildfire risk in three ways. First, most fires are caused by people. Second, a substantial fraction, if not most, of wildland firefighting effort is dedicated to defending property rather than on fire perimeter containment, resulting in larger fires. Third, most rural homes in vulnerable locations are not fire-hardy, driving higher levels of toxins in smoke and creating dangerous house-to-house fire contagion risks.

Where Should Society Invest in Wildfire Solutions?

Solutions to the western wildfire “problem” begin by closing two key gaps in general social understanding. First and foremost, fires are a natural component of the ecosystem. Ecologically, we should be advocating for more wildfire acreage, albeit at lower burn severity. However, even if we were to find the magic sweet spot of wildfire use and suppression, we will fail to prevent occasional large fires.

Second, those who are most at risk need to better understand that they, collectively, are the generators of risk to each other and to public lands. This is in sharp contrast to the currently widespread public opinion that rural communities are the victims of wildfire problems generated on public lands.

These realizations suggest a more difficult change than reduction of fuels on public lands is needed; we need to foster change in risk attitudes and behaviors by people in rural communities. To begin, we must ask “how we can create an environment that reduces the risk of loss of life and property damage when there are wildfires,” rather than “how do we eliminate wildfires.” Home hardening, which includes implementing modifications such as fire proof attic vents and fireproof exteriors (e.g., metal roofs, cement siding) is the first strategy. The second major strategy for reducing wildfire is to create defensible space by managing vegetation in communities and near homes so that small fires do not become destructive wildfires. With non-flammable building materials and adequate defensible space, most buildings are resilient to wildfire.

Creating social change may be slow, but we need to work toward that change. To encourage change we need to understand what drivers of change are in place, potentially available, or socially unappealing. For example, home hardening can be expensive, and maintaining defensible space may reduce the perceived value of the property to the landowners.

Encouraging Adaptation

There are three generalized strategies policy makers may use to drive societal change: information, incentives, and penalties. Agencies are well along in providing informational resources in the hopes that landowners increase fire safety. Advice is available from local, state, and federal governments and university extension services. In California, the major power supplier even has a link to how private landowners can decrease fire risk. These recommendations, though helpful, are not widely adopted.

The second option is to provide financial incentives to encourage landowners to adopt risk-reducing strategies. Incentive monies are available. For example, the California Department of Emergency Services offers grants for home hardening to qualified individuals, but the available funds are not close to matching the scale of the problem. Financial incentives can also work on increased costs of the status quo. For example, it has become expensive and difficult to insure homes that are in high fire risk environments. Homeowners may be rewarded by insurance companies with reduced rates for home hardening. However, it is estimated that there are over 5 million housing units in the California WUI alone. With a rough estimate of $60,000 per house to replace roofs and siding to be fire resistant, this could cost over $250 billion. It is costing California nearly a billion dollars annually to meet its wildland fuels reduction goals. Only a small fraction of that budget is targeted toward private landowners. Further, landscaping professionals are not, as a rule, required to be trained in defensible space design, and may not follow best practices. We have a long way to go.

The third choice, obviously, is regulation, making it illegal to be out of compliance with risk reduction standards. States and counties are adopting building code changes to make future building more fire-safe. A recent policy change in California requires state inspection for required fire risk abatement through defensible space for homes sold in very high fire risk areas.

But, how are policy makers to decide what combination of these three tools will work to best manage the wildfire challenge? All three strategies are currently in use, and we are not achieving the changes we envision to resolve the WUI crisis with wildfire. Thus, we might argue that to make progress, levers must be pulled harder and probably more strategically. But we might also consider different sorts of information campaigns to elicit change. Currently, this information is mostly direct: How can you, as a landowner, reduce the risk to yourself and your property?

Part of the solution lies in better knowledge. Emerging fire risk models provide opportunities to identify where adaptation investments, on fuels or communities, are likely to have their highest impacts. Analogously, geographical assessments of infrastructural risks of ignition or fire acceleration can help direct limited resources toward critical locations.

In parallel, however, we need a better understanding of what motivates people. Understanding the home hardening/insurance trade-off that landowners face is a key component of developing strategies to encourage hardening. Striving for policies that balance the roles of utilities, local governments, and the insurance industry in helping homeowners increase fire resilience is also critical. Finally, society must grapple with social equitability issues when the cost of the challenge exceeds the capacity of many in society to bear.

Rebuilding Community

An economist’s approach to our current WUI crisis may be to assess strategies based on costs, benefits, risks, and uncertainties to create policy environments where private actors would choose resilience strategies. This may, for example, be achieved through a real cost insurance market. The challenge with market solutions alone is that they are likely to precipitate economic ruin for many, as people see property values collapse under the cost of compliance. Lack of insurance, the threat of penalties, and requirements to spend tens of thousands of dollars on home hardening is a recipe to reduce home values by a large margin.

There may be other opportunities that need exploration. In his 2018 book The Future of Capitalism, Paul Collier makes the point that we have lost a sense of community over the past 50 years. We have become more and more like the selfish actors that 20^th-century economists assumed, and less like the responsible community members that we previously expected ourselves to be. Collier suggests the way forward for society is to work to rebuild a sense of responsibility to community. In this, there is hope. Just in the past few years, numerous Prescribed Burn Associations have formed to privately manage fuels around vulnerable communities through prescribed fire.

The wildfire crisis may provide the opportunity for such community-building. If we commonly believed that failure to adopt fire resilience adaptation strategies was putting our families, friends, and neighbors at undue risk, we may be more likely to comply and adapt. However, we first need to better understand people’s risk perception with wildfire and the risk perceptions of our WUI communities. Only then can we optimize deploying resources to influence landowner and community behaviors through building a sense of responsibility to the common good.

Finally, information and incentives are not likely to be sufficient. Using policy levers that create penalties for non-compliance must be part of the solution. Arson is a crime; letting a campfire get away is criminal negligence. The utility company PG&E may be on the hook for over $25 billion dollars because of mistakes on their property that led to lives lost. However, we do not penalize landowners if a fire enters their property and, because of failure to comply with fire-safe practices, the fire accelerates and causes damage to other properties. If private property owners were culpable for damage to adjoining properties, we may see very different rates of home hardening and defensible space adoption. We carry high expectations of public landowners and public utilities. We should expect more of private landowners as well.

There is no magic bullet, there is no simple solution. Moving the western US into a condition where rural living is neither a threat to native ecosystems that experience wildfire nor a threat to those living there is a costly endeavor. Information, incentives, and penalties are all needed. How to optimize limited resources to see the biggest gains over the shortest period of time is needed. How to make government incentives more effective as well as looking beyond tax dollars and government financing is needed. However, lagging in this process has been the messaging that informs the public of the degree to which the risk and responsibility lies with private landowners. The western United States is NOT facing a wildfire crisis; we are facing a social crisis in rural communities at the nexus of natural ecosystem processes, climate change, and a legacy of fire suppression.

Read more stories by Mark W. Schwartz.