Trajectories of community fire adaptation: Social diversity, social fragmentation and the temporal evolution of wildfire action.

Abstract

There is increasing acknowledgement that the unique characteristics (i.e., social contexts) of human communities influence variable means for adapting to the growing risks posed by wildland fire. However, there has been less work documenting how community social contexts evolve over time, and the ways they might influence collective mitigations pursued in partnership with professionals when addressing wildfire planning. We conducted 73 semi-structured interviews with 112 residents, emergency management professionals, government officials and members of community organizations in two Nevada County, California, communities to better understand how evolving elements of local social context influenced grassroots approaches to wildfire evacuation planning. Our results suggest that distinct risk factors, shared identities, landscape relationships, and interactions with outside professionals operating in each proximal community influenced divergent strategies that members were pursuing to address primary concerns about safe evacuation during fire. Respondents also articulated how their predominant focus on evacuation adaptations emerged over time, and through the legacy of historic decisions and interactions that increased saliency of evacuation concerns. Our efforts uncovered key roadblocks to the implementation of "tailored" evacuation adaptations in both communities (i.e., local evacuation routes or the development of 'safety zones'), including key uncertainties about the use of chosen mitigations, changes in agency support for evacuation planning, and integration of grassroots planning into existing systems for emergency management. Underlying all the above findings was a need to better understand or forecast ongoing transitions in the social makeup and functioning of both communities, including the exploration of tactics reflecting community members' adaptation needs or strengths. We utilize and expand existing frameworks for understanding community wildfire adaptation to make community-specific suggestions about the best ways to organize the collective evacuation adaptations being pursued in each community. We also recommend strategies, research or collaborations with wildfire professionals that address ongoing uncertainties surrounding community wildfire evacuation or advance the use of alternatives to evacuation.