Embracing an all-lands approach to wildfire management

OREGON – Across the American West, forests have diverse owners and are managed for different goals. But when wildfire ignites on one parcel – whether managed by the USDA Forest Service, a corporation, a tribe or a family forest landowner – all neighbors are at risk. Fire doesn’t respect property boundaries.

For the past decade, the Forest Service has been promoting an all-lands approach that advocates cross-boundary cooperation to reduce fire danger across landscapes with multiple owners. In 2014, the Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership – a cooperative venture between the Forest Service and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service – formed to fund all-lands projects that involve forest and rangeland restoration, including fuels reduction.

Susan Charnley, a research social scientist with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, and colleagues recently looked at six of these projects in Oregon and California to identify the social factors that lead to success. They found that cross-boundary cooperation can make wildfire mitigation more effective. Charnley, and her colleagues concluded that, as with collective action in other contexts, certain factors help determine the success of this kind of project:

A shared understanding of the problem. Landowners understand how wildfire operates and how their actions affect it. They understand that acting collectively to reduce wildfire risk will have a better outcome than acting individually, or in an uncoordinated fashion.

Communication and coordination. Landowners communicate and develop coordinated strategies for reducing wild¬fire risk.

Capacity. Landowners need the financial, technical, and workforce capacity to par¬ticipate in these strategies.

Trust and reciprocity. Landowners trust that if they are proactive and treat fuels, their neighbors will too.

Benefit-cost ratio. Landowners perceive that over the long term, the joint benefits of coordinated wildfire risk reduction will exceed the short-term, individual costs of collective action.

The catastrophic wildfires that now seem the norm each summer have social and ecological costs. By understanding the factors that yield effective collective action, the process can be better replicated to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West. To read more, please visit the complete edition of Science Findings 237.

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