Hazards SEES: Advancing Resilience to Compounding Disasters: An Integrated Natural-Human Systems Assessment of Wildfire Vulnerability

该项目旨在通过建模和绘制社区和生态系统服务对野火的脆弱性，提高对野火灾害的抵御能力。随着时间的推移，野火的危害显著增加，因为社区扩展到更多靠近城市界面的农村地区，野火大规模快速增长的条件日益普遍。无论是最初的野火事件，还是随之而来的火灾后的洪水和山体滑坡，都对易火环境中不断增长的人口、与这些人口相关的基础设施，以及其所依赖的生态系统服务（如清洁水或木材或旅游业等经济基础）构成了相当大的威胁。然而，人们对其他环境因素（如森林干旱和树皮甲虫爆发）如何助长野火蔓延和火灾后洪水的可能性知之甚少，目前也没有以一种支持政策制定和社区适应规划的综合方式进行建模。该项目将重点放在太平洋西北地区，为现有的生物地球模型开发一个火灾组件，以提高我们对导致野火成为灾害的因素的理解，并优先考虑利益相关者的参与和公众参与，以确定将提高适应能力并克服社会和政治障碍的管理行动。尽管周期性野火对健康的生态系统很重要，但生物物理和社会经济因素的结合可以将火灾转变为灾难，对社会生态环境产生负面影响。这些影响可能会持续数十年，并可能增加对随后的连锁灾害的脆弱性，如洪水、山体滑坡，以及地方到区域经济崩溃的可能性。提高社区对这些复杂的、与野火有关的灾害的恢复能力，需要特别关注从地方到国家的空间尺度和从几分钟到几十年的时间尺度上的社会、经济、政治和环境动态。人们对火灾、气候、生态系统结构和功能、森林经营活动及其在多个尺度上的影响之间的孤立相互作用的认识日益加深。然而，人们对这些相互作用的复杂和动态耦合形成一个综合的人-自然系统模型（包括与政策、资源管理和适应能力的联系）知之甚少。在全球环境不断变化的背景下，这种综合的缺乏限制了野火的恢复能力。该项目的总体目标是支持地方、区域和国家层面的政策和其他决策过程，以减少野火成为灾难的风险，提高社区和生态适应能力。这将通过以下方式实现：1)通过综合环境建模的新发展，在区域气候和其他森林生态系统扰动（如未来气候的干旱、昆虫爆发和火灾管理历史）相互作用的背景下，提高对野火风险及其相关影响的理解；2)使用可扩展的区域方法提高评估和预测野火脆弱性和恢复力的能力。3)与利益相关者咨询小组协调，开发决策支持系统，提供空间明确的可行行动，以提高地方、区域和国家的野火恢复能力。

This project seeks to increase resilience to wildfire hazards by modeling and mapping community and ecosystem service vulnerability to wildfire. The hazards of wildfire have increased significantly over time as a function of communities expanding into more rural areas adjacent to the urban interface and the increasing prevalence of conditions for large and rapid wildfire growth. Both initial wildfire events and the post-fire floods and landslides that often follow them are considerable threats to the growing population in fire-prone environments, the infrastructure associated with that populace, and the ecosystem services it relies upon, such as clean water or an economic base such as timber or tourism. However, the manner in which other environmental factors, such as drought and bark beetle outbreaks in forests, contribute to wildfire spread and the potential for post-fire flooding is poorly understood and not currently modeled in an integrated way that supports policy development and community adaptation planning. This project focuses on the Pacific Northwest region to develop a fire component to the existing BioEarth model that will improve our understanding of factors that contribute to wildfires becoming disasters, and prioritizes stakeholder and involvement and public engagement to identify management actions that will increase adaptive capacity and overcome social and political barriers.Although periodic wildfires are important for a healthy ecosystem, a combination of biophysical and socioeconomic factors can turn a fire into a disaster, with negative impacts in socioecological contexts. These impacts can last for decades, and can include increased vulnerability to subsequent, cascading hazards such as flooding, landslides, and the potential for local to regional economic collapse. Increasing community resilience to these compounding, wildfire-related disasters requires specific attention to social, economic, political, and environmental dynamics at spatial scales ranging from local to national and at temporal scales ranging from minutes to multiple decades. There is a growing understanding of isolated interactions between fire, climate, ecosystem structure and function, forest management activities, and their impacts at multiple scales. The complex and dynamic coupling of these interactions into an integrated human-natural systems model that includes links to policy, resource management, and adaptive capacity, however, is poorly understood. This lack of synthesis limits wildfire resilience in the context of a changing global environment. The overarching goal of this project is to support policy and other decision-making processes at local, regional, and national scales to reduce the risk of wildfire becoming a disaster and increase community and ecological adaptive capacities. This will be done by 1) advancing the understanding of wildfire risk and associated impacts in the context of interactions between regional climate and other forest ecosystem perturbations (e.g., drought in future climates, insect outbreak, and a history of fire management) through new developments in integrated environmental modeling, 2) improving the ability to assess and predict vulnerability and resilience to wildfire using a scalable regional approach, and 3) coordinating with a stakeholder advisory group to develop a decision support system for providing spatially-explicit feasible actions to increase local, regional, and national wildfire resilience.