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Wildfire and the threat it poses to society represents an example of the complex, dynamic relationship between social and ecological systems. Increasingly, wildfire adaptation is posited as a pathway to shift the approach to fire from a suppression paradigm that seeks to control fire to a paradigm that focuses on “living with” and “adapting to” wildfire. In this study, we seek insights into what it means to adapt to wildfire from a range of stakeholders whose efforts contribute to the management of wildfire. Study participants provided insights into the meaning, relevance, and use of the concept of fire adaptation as it relates to their wildfire-related activities. A key finding of this investigation suggests that social scale is of key importance in the conceptualization and understanding of adaptation for participating stakeholders. Indeed, where you stand in terms of understandings of fire adaptation depends in large part on where you sit.

Parcel-level risk (PLR) describes how wildfire risk varies from home to home based on characteristics that relate to likely fire behavior, the susceptibility of homes to fire, and the ability of firefighters to safely access properties. Here, we describe the WiRē Rapid Assessment (RA), a parcel-level rapid wildfire risk assessment tool designed to evaluate PLR with a small set of measures for all homes in a community. We investigate the relationship between 2019 WiRē RA data collected in the Columbine Lake community in Grand County, Colorado, and whether assessed homes were destroyed in the 2020 East Troublesome Fire. We find that the overall parcel-level risk scores, as well as many individual attributes, relate to the chance that a home was destroyed. We also find strong evidence of risk spillovers across neighboring properties. The results demonstrate that even coarsely measured RA data capture meaningful differences in wildfire risk across a community. The findings also demonstrate the importance of accounting for multiple aspects of PLR, including both hazards and susceptibility, when assessing the risk of wildfire to homes and communities. Finally, the results underscore that relatively small actions by residents before a fire can influence wildfire outcomes.

Negative imagery of destruction may induce or inhibit action to reduce risks from climate-exacerbated hazards, such as wildfires. This has generated conflicting assumptions among experts who communicate with homeowners: half of surveyed wildfire practitioners perceive a lack of expert agreement about the effect of negative imagery (a burning house) on homeowner behavior, yet most believe negative imagery is more engaging. We tested whether this expectation matched homeowner response in the United States. In an online experiment, homeowners who viewed negative imagery reported more negative emotions but the same behavioral intentions compared to those who viewed status-quo landscape photos. In a pre-registered field experiment, homeowners who received a postcard showing negative imagery were equally likely, overall, to visit a wildfire risk webpage as those whose postcard showed a status quo photo. However, the negative imagery decreased webpage visits as homeowners’ wildfire risk increased. These results illustrate the importance of testing assumptions to encourage behavioral adaptation to climate change.

Studies find various, and often small or negligible, impacts of floodplain designation on home sales prices in the United States, calling into question the U.S.’s National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) effectiveness at internalizing flood risk into the residential property market. However, studies also tend to focus only on standalone homes, although a substantial portion of the U.S. housing market, particularly within designated floodplains, consists of condominiums: single-unit residences that are bundled with an ownership share in common property. This study investigates the price impact of floodplain designation for condominiums and for standalone properties in Boulder County, Colorado, U.S., and finds a strong impact for condominiums but none for standalone properties. Results are consistent across hedonic price estimation and non-parametric matching estimation. Numerous factors may contribute to this difference, including differences in the pre-transaction provision of flood insurance cost information and whether maintaining ongoing flood insurance is compulsory. These results have implications for the NFIP and offer insights for policy interventions for internalizing risks more generally. They also caution against generalizing from the experience of the NFIP without detailed consideration of the contexts and specific conditions in which it is applied.

Private actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change may have benefits to both the individual and society. In some cases, an individual may be motivated by appeals that highlight benefits to others, rather than to oneself. We test whether such prosocial framing influences information-seeking behavior to address wildfire risk among homeowners. In a field experiment across ten communities in western Colorado, property owners (n = 2977) received a postcard from their local fire department highlighting the impact of risk mitigation to either “your property” (private benefits) or “our community” (social benefits). The postcard directed recipients to visit a personalized webpage on wildfire risk. Overall, 10.5% of property owners visited their personalized risk webpage. There was little difference in webpage visitation between those who received the social (11.3%) rather than the private (9.7%) benefits message (χ2 = 1.74, p = 0.19). However, response may depend on a property owner’s relationship to the community. Those who reside within the community (as opposed to out-of-town owners) or who were in an evacuation zone during a recent wildfire were more likely to visit their webpages after receiving the social benefits message. How homeowners view their contributions to shared risk and whether simple changes in messaging influence prosocial behavior can inform efforts to address climate-exacerbated hazards.

Private landowners are important actors in landscape-level wildfire risk management. Accordingly, wildfire programs and policy encourage wildland–urban interface homeowners to engage with local organizations to properly mitigate wildfire risk on their parcels. We investigate whether parcel-level wildfire risk assessment data, commonly used to inform community-level planning and resource allocation, can be used to “nudge” homeowners to engage further with a regional wildfire organization. We sent 4564 households in western Colorado a letter that included varying combinations of risk information about their community, their parcels, and their neighbors’ parcels, and we measured follow-up visits to a personalized “Web site”. We find that the effect of providing parcel-specific information depends on baseline conditions: Informing homeowners about their property’s wildfire risk increases information-seeking among homeowners of the highest-risk parcels by about 5 percentage points and reduces information-seeking among homeowners of lower-risk parcels by about 6 percentage points. Parcel-specific information also increases the overall response in the lowest risk communities by more than 10 percentage points. Further, we find evidence of a 6-percentage point increase in response rate associated with receiving a social comparison treatment that signals neighboring properties as being either low or moderate risk on average. These results, especially considered against the 13 percent overall average response rate, offer causal evidence that providing parcel-specific wildfire risk information can influence behavior. As such, we demonstrate the effectiveness of simple outreach in engaging wildland–urban interface homeowners with wildfire risk professionals in ways that leverage existing data.

BackgroundWildfire simulation models are used to derive maps of burn probability (BP) based on fuels, weather, topography and ignition locations, and BP maps are key components of wildfire risk assessments.AimsFew studies have compared BP maps with real-world fires to evaluate their suitability for near-future risk assessment. Here, we evaluated a BP map for the conterminous US based on the large fire simulation model FSim.MethodsWe compared BP with observed wildfires from 2016 to 2022 across 128 regions representing similar fire regimes (‘pyromes’). We evaluated the distribution of burned areas across BP values, and compared burned area distributions among fire size classes.Key resultsAcross all pyromes, mean BP was moderately correlated with observed burned area. An average of 71% of burned area occurred in higher-BP classes, vs 79% expected. BP underpredicted burned area in the Mountain West, especially for extremely large fires.ConclusionsThe FSim BP map was useful for estimating subsequent wildfire hazard, but may have underestimated burned areas where input data did not reflect recent climate change, vegetation change or human ignition patterns.ImplicationsOur evaluations indicate that caution is needed when relying on simulation-based BP maps to inform management decisions. Our results also highlight potential opportunities to improve model estimates.

Wildland–urban interface (WUI) homeowners who do not mitigate the wildfire risk on their properties impose a negative externality on society. To reduce the social costs of wildfire and incentivise homeowners to take action, cost sharing programs seek to reduce the barriers that impede wildfire risk mitigation. Using survey data from a WUI community in western Colorado and a two-stage decision framework, we examine residents’ willingness to participate in a cost sharing program for removing vegetation on their properties and the amount they are willing to contribute to the cost of that removal. We find that different factors motivate decisions about participation and about how much to pay. Willingness to participate correlates with both financial and non-monetary considerations, including informational barriers and wildfire risk perceptions, but not with concerns about effectiveness or visual impacts. Residents of properties with higher wildfire risk levels are less likely to participate in the cost sharing than those with lower levels of wildfire risk. We find widespread, positive willingness to pay for vegetation removal, with the amount associated negatively with property size and positively with respondent income. These results can inform the development of cost sharing programs to encourage wildfire risk mitigation on private property.

When planning for the future, how do you balance adaptability to changing conditions with optimization to current conditions? This question underlies the tension between two frameworks for understanding and managing the interactions of people with the natural environment: resiliency and efficiency. On one hand, the interactions among and within human-natural systems often demonstrate variability and complex behavior, to which adaptation may be necessary. On the other hand, reductionism and efficiency provide the tools for addressing scarcity and the tradeoffs that scarcity necessitates. Therefore, it is beneficial to inform reductionist understanding and efficient management of human-natural systems with lessons from resilience and complexity and to inform resilience thinking through the use of efficiency-based tools. In this dissertation, I investigate three different natural resource questions using environmental economics techniques while drawing insight from the frameworks of resilience and complexity. For each issue, I focus on understanding and addressing a different dimension of pertinent variability. Specifically, I consider the following aspects of variation: · Variation across the preferences of individuals in society with a latent class model that links stated preferences and attitudes regarding the management of an invasive species in high-elevation forests. This demonstrates a small set of categorically different preferences for resilience-based management of the forests. · Variation in the capitalization of flood risk across different types of residential property using both a spatial-autoregressive hedonic pricing model and a non-parametric matching estimation. This demonstrates consistent, significant differences in the discount for properties in floodplains across condominiums and standalone properties. · Variation across the objectives of management over time by simulating a dynamic bioeconomic model of managing nutrient loading in a shallow lake system. This demonstrates the importance of considering the interaction of human dynamics with natural-system behavior. Combined, these efforts demonstrate the possibilities for, and benefits from, using the frameworks of resilience and complexity for perspective and the frameworks of efficiency and optimization as tools, thereby connecting resilience with economics when investigating issues involving complex, interacting human-natural systems.

For another 5 percent of respondents, their homeowners insurance company required wildfire risk mitigation as a condition of issuing a policy. (Because a small set of respondents (3 percent) noted multiple effects, these categories do not add up to the 18 percent total.) The remaining 82 percent of Delta County WUI respondents knew of no effect of wildfire risk on their homeowners insurance. [...]our findings suggest limited to no change in behavior by homeowners who know that wildfire risk affects their homeowners insurance. The patterns observed might not be generalizable beyond the communities studied. [...]the parcel-level rapid wildfire assessments do not reflect a full inventory of a property's wildfire risks; rather, they focus on key characteristics related to a structure's potential defensibility and survivability during a wildfire event (see Meldrum (2015a)). [...]our findings suggest that insurance might be an effective mechanism for raising awareness about wildfire risks, at least among people who attend to the details of their insurance policies.