Political orientation shapes attitudes to fuel management in the wildfire disaster prone island of Tasmania, Australia

Managing fuel loads is a critical step in reducing the risk of large, devastating wildfires. Fuel management activities can change the natural and amenity values of bushland proximate to where people live. Some treatments, such as prescribed burning, can affect air quality and hence human health. Accordingly, how fuels should be managed is intensely debated in the community and often becomes a political issue. Despite this, few studies have examined how political orientation affects attitudes towards fuel management. Using Australia's fire-prone island state of Tasmania as a setting, we examined the relationship between political affiliation and preferred fuel management method for eight plausible techniques through a survey of 751 adult residents. Post-hoc the fuel management methods were ordinated on a spectrum of naturalness and empowerment. Ordinal logistic regression revealed that respondents affiliated with Australia's major conservative party, the Liberal Party, were significantly more likely to prefer methods that were less natural and involved higher command and control, albeit with wide variance in preferences. Environmentalist Greens affiliates preferred more natural and self-determining methods, with much less variance. Labor (the Australian social democratic party) affiliates favoured methods at the centre of the spectrum (e.g., government prescribed burning), as did the large proportion of respondents without a declared political affiliation, though with more scatter. Concerns about effectiveness were most salient to Liberal Party voters' decisions, while environmental impacts were most salient to Greens voters. These findings can inform communications and efforts to engage the community in co-designing and implementing fuel management plans.