Abstract
Increasing numbers of homes are being destroyed by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface. With projections of climate change and housing growth potentially exacerbating the threat of wildfire to homes and property, effective fire-risk reduction alternatives are needed as part of a comprehensive fire management plan. Land use planning represents a shift in traditional thinking from trying to eliminate wildfires, or even increasing resilience to them, toward avoiding exposure to them through the informed placement of new residential structures. For land use planning to be effective, it needs to be based on solid understanding of where and how to locate and arrange new homes. We simulated three scenarios of future residential development and projected landscape-level wildfire risk to residential structures in a rapidly urbanizing, fire-prone region in southern California. We based all future development on an econometric subdivision model, but we varied the emphasis of subdivision decision-making based on three broad and common growth types: infill, expansion, and leapfrog. Simulation results showed that decision-making based on these growth types, when applied locally for subdivision of individual parcels, produced substantial landscape-level differences in pattern, location, and extent of development. These differences in development, in turn, affected the area and proportion of structures at risk from burning in wildfires. Scenarios with lower housing density and larger numbers of small, isolated clusters of development, i.e., resulting from leapfrog development, were generally predicted to have the highest predicted fire risk to the largest proportion of structures in the study area, and infill development was predicted to have the lowest risk. These results suggest that land use planning should be considered an important component to fire risk management and that consistently applied policies based on residential pattern may provide substantial benefits for future risk reduction.
Highlights
The recognition that homes are vulnerable to wildfire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has been established for decades [e.g., 1,2]; but with a recent surge in structures burning, this issue is receiving widespread attention in policy, the media, and the scientific literature
Like those in Greece, Australia, southern California, and Colorado have resulted in scores of lost lives, thousands of structures burned, and billions of dollars in expenditures [3,4,5,6]
Our simulations of residential development showed that planning policies based on different growth types, applied locally for subdivision of individual parcels, will likely produce substantial and cumulative landscape-level differences in pattern, location, and extent of development
Summary
The recognition that homes are vulnerable to wildfire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has been established for decades [e.g., 1,2]; but with a recent surge in structures burning, this issue is receiving widespread attention in policy, the media, and the scientific literature. With the potential for increasingly severe fire conditions under climate change [7] and projections of continued housing development [8], it is becoming clear that more effective fire-risk reduction solutions are needed. Traditional fire-risk reduction focuses heavily on fire suppression and manipulation of wildland vegetation to reduce hazardous fuels [9]. One issue is that fuel treatments may not be located in the most strategic positions, i.e., in the wildland-urban interface [11]. Fuel treatments may be ineffective against embers or flaming materials that blow ahead of the fire front [17]
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