Cross boundary fire risk mitigation webinar series

Co-managing wildfire risk across boundaries (CoMFRT)

(Part of the Science You Can Use winter webinar series)

View the webinar recording here.

Maureen Essen, Daniel R. Williams, Annie Schmidt, and Clint Cross

The Co-Management of Wildfire Risk Transmission Partnership (CoMFRT) brings together wildfire researchers, practitioners and decisionmakers to co-produce knowledge and actionable recommendations to support people and institutions successfully working together across scales and circumstances to best mitigate fire risk and build adaptation to wildfire. This presentation will provide an overview of the CoMFRT Partnership, key results and recommendations to date, and next steps all designed to underscore approaches for a variety of actors responsible for managing wildfire risk to better live with fire. This webinar will also serve as a kick-off to the CoMFRT webinar series that will share more extensive results and recommendations throughout the winter and early spring.

Reducing cross-boundary wildfire risk: What do we know about the challenges and how can we do it better?

Working together to reduce cross boundary wildfire risk using insights from social science

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Will Butler and Sarah McCaffrey

This presentation shares insights from literatures on cross boundary management (CBM), collaborative governance, and public management networks. The literature review is organized around 5 key questions: 1) Why should we engage in cross boundary management?, 2) What enables effective CBM?, 3) What are the challenges and barriers to CBM?, 4) What can be achieved through CBM?, 5) What capacities are needed to support CBM? This synthesis aims to clarify what we can gain from and how we can get better at working together across boundaries to address wildfire risks. The literature is broad and covers a range of public management domains, but the focus is on environmental and natural resources planning and management with attention to the applicability of key concepts and practices related to wildfire management where possible.

Moving from parcel risk assessments to building fire adapted communities

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View the recording here.

Jon Riley, Patty Champ, and Hannah Brenkert-Smith

The Wildfire Research team partnered with Chelan County Fire District #1 (CCFD1) in North Central Washington to pair parcel risk assessments with social data in the Squilchuck Drainage. Three findings from the social survey data are noteworthy. First, results indicated that study respondents have high expectations of wildfire response services. Second, the respondents indicated CCFD1 was the most used and useful source of wildfire risk information. Finally, community comparisons indicated community differences with respect to social connection, wildfire preparedness, barriers to mitigation, and acceptability of mitigation on nearby public lands. CCFD1 uses the tools and information from this project to guide their mitigation and education efforts.

 Designing suitable pathways to wildfire adaptation in and around communities: One size does not fit all

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View the recording here.

Travis Paveglio, Rose Shriner, and Catrin Edgeley

The community pathways team uses frameworks and approaches they developed during decades of studying how communities adapt differently to wildfire. They use their systematic approaches to better understand local wildfire adaptation needs and suggest tailored actions, policies or agreements that will result in local action. Longitudinal and ongoing lessons from the community pathways team help illuminate patterns of wildfire adaptation across landscapes or locations and allow populations with similar circumstances to share lessons about the best practices they can use to advance wildfire adaptation. This presentation will outline the primary characteristics of the interactional approach and discuss how they are being used to better understand or inform various cross boundary initiatives surrounding fire in the Wenacthcee, including: (1) varied responses to fuels treatment projects in the Methow Valley; (2) targeted planning for adaptation across diverse communities in Kittats county; and (3) support or conflict surrounding the incorporation of an agricultural area into a fire district serving an expanding urban area.

Using networks to leverage capacity to lower fire risk across boundaries

Max Nielsen-Pincus, Cody Evers, and Annie Schmidt

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View the recording here.

There are a diverse set of public and private players engaged in addressing wildfire risk across boundaries. This presentation will share results of the network analysis of actors active in some CoMFRT study sites. Findings show large, diverse, and cohesive networks that operate at multiple scales. Other findings to be discussed:

• Certain individuals hold outsized number of connections within these networks;
• The unique structure of networks is tied to the particular history of those regions (bottom-up vs. top-down example);
• Some organizational geographies overlap more than others, and these are natural locations for pursuing cross-boundary work.

Improving cross-boundary wildfire collaboration: Strategies to address barriers and align objectives

Laurie Yung, Brett Miller, Benjamin Gray, and Carina Wyborn

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View the recording here.

This webinar presents an overview of different structural and cultural aspects of wildland fire governance that promote and/or hinder collaboration across agencies and with non-agency partners. This type of collaboration is crucial to scaling-up wildfire management to achieve National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy goals through Shared Stewardship. These insights are based on interviews with wildland fire managers and other key stakeholders involved in wildfire governance in Washington and Utah, as well as Forest Service leadership in Washington D.C. In this webinar we unpack findings from these interviews and based on these findings we outline specific ways that agencies and partners can be more effective in their collaborations.

How does the field and leadership use what we have learned?

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View the recording here.

Practitioner partners involved in the CoMFRT project will talk about the research-practitioner partnership process, lessons from the CoMFRT project, and how work in these communities is moving forward.