Building Wildfire Resilience Into Forest Management Planning

http: //www.forestry.gov.uk/PDF/FCPG022.pdf/$FILE/FCPG022.pd

Wildfires represent a growing threat to environments, to people, communities, and to societies worldwide, particularly in the United States, Southern Europe, and Australia. Recognition of this growing risk has highlighted a need to develop people's capacity to adapt to annually occurring events that could increase in frequency and severity over the coming years and decades. The goal of ensuring sustained levels of protective measures in communities susceptible to wildfire hazard consequences has proved to be elusive. This book examines why this is so and identifies ways in which sustained levels of preparedness can be facilitated. Major topics include: wildfire preparedness and resiliency in community contexts; socially disastrous landscape fires in southeastern Australia; landscape typology of residential wildfire risk; proactive human response to wildfires outbreak; forest fires in wildland-urban interface, wildfire risk management; “stay or go” policy in the line of fire; social dimensions of forest fire; the influence of community diversity; evaluating a community engagement initiative; response to fire threats; social media and resiliency; and building on lessons learned. Additional information includes the landscape fires in southeastern Australia, wildfire risk management in Portugal; fire preparedness in Greece, Cyprus, and the Pine Barrens in the northeastern United States. The findings of research programs being conducted in the United States, Australia, Europe, India and South America are presented. The book includes case studies on the analysis and proposed actions of the wildland-urban interface being faced by Central Chile and South America. This book will provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the wildfire preparedness research and its application to the development of risk communications and public education programs.

Events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis in 2011 have provided unfortunate reminders of the susceptibility of many communities to devastating losses from natural hazards. These events provided graphic illustrations of how extreme hazard events adversely impact on people, affect communities and disrupt the community and societal mechanisms that serve to organize and sustain community capacities and functions. However, there is much that communities can do to mitigate their risk and manage disaster consequences. The construct that epitomizes how this is done is resilience. The contents of this volume provide valuable insights into how societal resilience can be developed and sustained. This considerably expanded new edition presents major topics of: Coexisting with Natural Hazards; Urban Resilience in Asia; Lifelines and Urban Resilience; Business Continuity in Disaster; Hazard Mitigation in Communities; Hazard Readiness and Resilience; Child Citizenship in Disaster Risk; Old Age and Resilience; Gender and Disaster Resilience; Impact of High Functionality on Resilience; Art and Resilience; Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Coping with Hazards; Religious Practices and Resilience; Living in Harmony with our Environment; Critical Incidence Response; Governance; Heat Wave Resilience; Wildfire Disaster Resilience; and Progress and Challenges to Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience. This exceptional book brings together contributions from international experts in core areas and includes chapters that provide and overarching framework within which the need for interrelationships between levels to be developed is discussed. The book will be an outstanding resource for those researching or teaching courses in emergency management, disaster management, community development, environmental planning and urban development. In addition, it will serve law enforcement and emergency agencies, welfare agencies, and professionals in applied psychology.

Outlines a procedure for fire management planning for parks; wilderness areas; and other wild, natural, or essentially undeveloped areas. Discusses background and philosophy of wilderness fire management, planning concepts, planning elements, and planning methods.

Fire is rarely out of the headlines, from large natural wildfires raging across the Australian or Californian countrysides to the burning of buildings such as the disasters of Grenfell tower and Notre Dame. Fire on these scales can represent a serious risk to human life and property. But the advent of fire made and controlled by humans also represented a crucial point in our evolution, allowing us to cook our food, forge our weapons, and warm our homes. This Very Short Introduction covers the fundamentals of fire, whether wild or under human control, starting with the basics of ignition, combustion, and fuel. Andrew Scott considers both natural wildfires and the role of humans in making and suppressing fire. Despite frightening reports of wildfire destruction, he also shows how landscape fires have been part of our planet's history for 400 million years, and do not always have to be extinguished. He also considers the problem of fires in urban settings, including new ways to prevent fires. The cost of wildfire can be steep - as well as the burning, post-fire erosion and flooding can have a great impact on both humans and the environment. It can also have a lasting effect in shaping ecosystems and plant life. Scott ends by examining the relationship between fire and the climate, and considering the future of wildfire in a warming world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

After a brief historical overview of forest fire management in Ontario, this paper discusses several potentially useful levels of protection measures. It describes a hypothetical forest which is used to illustrate how very simple fire management subsystems can interact to produce complex system behaviour that is sometimes difficult to understand and manage. An overview of the basic principles of fire economics, planning under uncertainty, and traditional approaches to level-of-protection planning provides an analytical foundation for fire management planning. An integrated fire/forest management framework that can be enhanced and used for level-of-protection planning in Ontario is then presented. Finally, several important issues that should be addressed when assessing Ontario's level of fire protection needs are briefly discussed.