U.S. wildfire governance as social-ecological problem

• Published in: Ecology and society Vol. 21; no. 4; p. 3
• Main Author: Steelman, Toddi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ottawa Resilience Alliance 01-12-2016
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Climate change; Climate change policy; Ecological sustainability; Ecology; environmental governance; Environmental policy; Fire ecology; Forest & brush fires; Forest ecology; Forest fires; Governance; Heterogeneity; Human ecology; institutions; policy; scale; Social conditions & trends; social-ecological system; Spatial discrimination; Synthesis; United States; URLs; wildfire; Wildfires; United States > US
• ISSN: 1708-3087; 1708-3087
• DOI: 10.5751/ES-08681-210403

There are fundamental spatial and temporal disconnects between the specific policies that have been crafted to address our wildfire challenges. The biophysical changes in fuels, wildfire behavior, and climate have created a new set of conditions for which our wildfire governance system is poorly suited to address. To address these challenges, a reorientation of goals is needed to focus on creating an anticipatory wildfire governance system focused on social and ecological resilience. Key characteristics of this system could include the following: (1) not taking historical patterns as givens; (2) identifying future social and ecological thresholds of concern; (3) embracing diversity/heterogeneity as principles in ecological and social responses; and (4) incorporating learning among different scales of actors to create a scaffolded learning system.