Forest owners and fuels management coordination. When neighbours’ actions matter

Abstract

ABSTRACTForest owners’ coordination for wildfires prevention is still a largely unexplored area of research, and an important social issue in contexts in which there is an increase in the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires, such as Portugal. Our approach innovates by introducing a social interaction between plot-neighbourhood owners to the analysis of attitudes and behaviours toward fuels management coordination. As a case study, we focus on a parish in the Northwest of Portugal, and using data from a forest owners’ survey, we compare the owner’s willingness-to-coordinate and his/her current fuels treatments implicit-coordination with his neighbouring property owners. Our findings show that indeed neighbours’ actions count, that is, they are interdependent with the owner’s current management practices and owner-neighbours behaviour interaction is relevant to his/her willingness-to-reduce fuels load. Local social capital favours similarity of behaviour toward bush-clearing by plot-neighbours. The owners’ willingness-to-coordinate, conversely, is not influenced by the plot-neighbours’ actions or by the local social capital, and is instead strongly correlated with the owner’ sociodemographic profile. We conclude for the need to look for context-dependent constraints of the owners’ fuels reduction and coordination practices.