Resources and Reflections

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2009) — Only 11 percent of wildfire mitigation efforts undertaken as a result of a long-term federal fuels-reduction program to cut down catastrophic wildfire risk to communities have been undertaken near people’s homes or offices in the past five years, says a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The analysis of the U.S. National Fire Plan shows that as more Americans live in or near fire-prone forests and more wildfires burn, most federally funded activities to reduce fuels and wildfire hazard have occurred far from the “wildland-urban interface,” the area prioritized by federal wildfire policies. The result suggests that federal wildfire treatments are minimally effective at mitigating the threat of wildfire to homes and people in the western United States.

The study also suggests that future fire mitigation strategies should emphasize constructing and maintaining “firewise” homes, restricting the abundance and configuration of residential housing units near wildlands susceptible to fire, and improving cooperation among private and public landowners in implementing fire mitigation treatments and in paying for fire suppression.

“Our comprehensive analysis suggests that fire mitigation treatments do not effectively target the wildland-urban interface,” said Tania Schoennagel, a research scientist in CU-Boulder’s geography department.

Schoennagel led a team of researchers who examined 44,000 federally funded wildfire mitigation projects in 11 western states between 2004 and 2008.

Schoennagel’s team is the first to evaluate the U.S. National Fire Plan’s management activities across the West, and to compare the location of fire-mitigation treatments to the wildland-urban interface and its nearby surroundings. The team’s findings will be published in the June 8 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-authors on the study included CU-Boulder graduate student Teresa Chapman, the University of Montana’s Cara Nelson and Gunner Carnwath and Colorado State University’s David Theobald. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wilburforce Foundation.

The team found that only 11 percent of fuel-reduction activities took place within about 1.5 miles of the wildland-urban interface, where fires pose the greatest risk to homes and people. At the same time, most of the treated land was more than 6 miles from this high-risk zone.

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