Rethinking resilience to wildfire (McWethy et al., 2019)
Full citation: McWethy, D.B. et al. 2019. Rethinking resilience to wildfire. Nat Sustain 2, 797–804 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0353-8
Abstract: Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming increasingly common worldwide, and large wildfires are having extraordinary impacts on people and property, despite years of investments to support social–ecological resilience to wildfires. This has prompted new calls for land management and policy reforms as current land and fire management approaches have been unable to effectively respond to the rapid changes in climate and development patterns that strongly control fire behaviour and continue to exacerbate the risks and hazards to human communities. Promoting social–ecological resilience in rapidly changing, fire-susceptible landscapes requires adoption of multiple perspectives of resilience, extending beyond ‘basic resilience’ (or bouncing back to a similar state) to include ‘adaptive resilience’ and ‘transformative resilience’, which require substantial and explicit changes to social–ecological systems. Clarifying these different perspectives and identifying where they will be most effective helps prioritize efforts to better coexist with wildfire in an increasingly flammable world.
Key excerpt: “From an ecological perspective, promoting adaptive resilience will necessarily require a portfolio of management activities tailored to specific biophysical conditions, cultural and ecological resources, and societal goals for a given landscape or watershed. In forests with lower probabilities of fire (for example, cool and moist forests and often high-elevation forests), efforts could be focused on treating locally drier sites based on aspect and landscape position, thinning less drought-tolerant trees, and replanting and reseeding with species better adapted to projected future climate conditions. An adaptive management approach can be used to compare ecosystem responses in treated and untreated landscapes to determine whether treatments confer climate-adaptation benefits such as resistance to drought or insect outbreaks, and to determine how best to meet management goals as conditions continue to change.”