Adapting to wildfire: a review of ongoing wildfire planning and mitigation efforts across 10 landscapes in the Western United States

Abstract

Wildfire impacts on communities and forests are a growing crisis in the United States. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service launched a major investment in landscape-level treatments to reduce hazardous fuels, which focused on 10 priority landscapes across eight states in the Western United States. Although these landscapes were designed to encompass communities facing high levels of wildfire risk, it is less clear how other community characteristics might vary, including sociodemographics, wildfire history, and past efforts to reduce wildfire risk. The goal of this report is to systematically describe the 10 landscapes initially prioritized by the Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) to inform collaborative adaptation efforts between the agency and local communities. We collected information on landownership and economic and demographic trends at the county level; overviewed vegetation and recent wildfire history at the landscape level; and described two wildfire adaptation efforts: (1) the extent of fuel treatments conducted on National Forest System (NFS) lands in the past decade and (2) land-use planning, policy, and regulatory tools implemented at the county scale to address wildfire hazards. We found that although the areas included in the initial WCS landscapes share extensive housing in the wildland-urban interface, they span a range of social settings. Some landscapes are in largely rural, sparsely populated areas, while others are centered around metropolitan areas, many of which have seen substantial population growth, urbanization, and residential development in high wildfire hazard areas over recent years. Many residents of WCS landscapes have similar potential vulnerabilities, particularly in rural counties, including lower per capita income, older populations, and mobile homes representing a larger proportion of housing. Our analysis of fuel treatments conducted on NFS lands shows variation in the area treated, from less than 4 percent of NFS lands in some landscapes treated in the past decade to a high of 20 percent in others. We also found that counties across the WCS landscapes ranged substantially in their use of planning, policy, and regulatory tools, with some having comprehensive approaches in place, while others were beginning this process. There was no clear relationship between county-scale planning and regulatory adaptations and fuel treatment efforts, but counties with larger numbers of wildland-urban interface housing units typically had higher investment in one or both adaptations. This report lays the groundwork for more research to examine the human dimensions of implementation of the WCS, and more broadly, the processes of adaptation to growing wildfire risk in the Western United States.

Citation

Anderson, Robert M.; Hixson, Kathryn; Johnston, Kelly; Mockrin, Miranda H.; Mowery, Molly. 2025. Adapting to wildfire: a review of ongoing wildfire planning and mitigation efforts across 10 landscapes in the Western United States. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-1030. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 118 p. https://doi.org/10.2737/pnw-gtr-1030.