Year after year intense wildfires traverse landscapes across the West, threatening nearby communities. Smoke billows through the valleys, residents evacuate, and homes burn. In 2000 a new policy framework, the National Fire Plan, was put in place to help solve the wildfire problem. Since then the federal government has allocated billions of dollars toward fire management, with a special emphasis placed on reducing risks in those areas where private property abuts public lands.
While protecting communities at risk lies at the heart of the national fire policy, we have not yet determined exactly how to reduce those communities’ vulnerability. Is the best use of scarce federal resources to focus on cutting brush and trees close to homes to create a “defensible space”? Or should federal agencies try to treat larger swaths of forest to reduce a fire’s intensity before the flames can reach a community? How much of a “buffer” is actually necessary to protect structures from wildland fire? Even more fundamentally, are the federal and state entities charged with safeguarding our municipalities able to define or identify the location of at-risk communities?
In The Wilderness Society’s report, Targeting the Community Fire Planning Zone: Mapping Matters, forest ecologist Dr. Greg Aplet and landscape ecologist Bo Wilmer find these definitions to be both immensely important and extremely elusive. Community Fire Planning Zones (CFPZ) — areas in and around communities where federal, state and local fire managers should focus their efforts to mitigate fire risk — include tens of millions of acres, much of which is private land. In order to successfully tackle such an immense planning challenge, protection strategies must be tightly focused and well-informed. But because each state uses a different method to designate communities at risk, no national-scale definition of the CFPZ exists today. The coordination of local and national fire-safe activities suffers as a result.
The National Fire Plan has rightly placed its emphasis on the importance of reducing wildfire risk within communities and on the public lands nearby. Before our nation can protect the hundreds of western communities currently at risk, however, we must first understand where they are.
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