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

Hazards SEES：提高对复合灾害的抵御能力：对野火脆弱性的自然-人类系统综合评估

• 批准号: 1520873
• 负责人: Alistair Smith
• 金额: $ 277.5万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Idaho
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1520873&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Hazards; SEES; Advancing; Resilience; Compounding

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.

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来提高对野火危害的抵御能力。随着社区扩展到邻近城市界面的更多农村地区，以及野火大规模快速增长的条件日益普遍，野火的危害随着时间的推移而显著增加。最初的野火事件以及随后经常发生的灾后洪水和山体滑坡都对火灾多发环境中不断增长的人口、与该人口相关的基础设施以及其所依赖的生态系统服务（例如清洁水）构成了相当大的威胁。木材或旅游业等经济基础。然而，人们对干旱和森林树皮甲虫爆发等其他环境因素如何促成野火蔓延和火灾后洪水的可能性知之甚少，目前也没有以支持政策制定和社区适应规划的综合方式进行建模。该项目侧重于太平洋西北地区，为现有的生物地球模型开发一个火灾组件，这将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和参与以及公众参与，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。生物物理因素和社会经济因素结合在一起，可使火灾演变成灾害，对社会生态环境产生负面影响。这些影响可能持续数十年，并可能包括更容易受到洪水、山体滑坡等后续级联灾害的影响，以及地方到区域经济崩溃的可能性。提高社区对这些与野火有关的复合灾害的复原力，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。人们越来越了解火灾、气候、生态系统结构和功能、森林管理活动及其在多个尺度上的影响之间孤立的相互作用。然而，人们对这些相互作用复杂且动态地耦合到综合的人与自然系统模型（包括与政策、资源管理和适应能力的联系）的了解甚少。这种缺乏综合性的情况限制了野火在不断变化的全球环境中的复原力。该项目的总体目标是支持地方、区域和国家各级的政策和其他决策过程，以减少野火成为灾害的风险，提高社区和生态适应能力。这将通过以下方式实现：1）在区域气候和其他森林生态系统扰动（例如，干旱在未来的气候，昆虫爆发，和火灾管理的历史），通过新的发展，在综合环境建模，2）提高能力，评估和预测脆弱性和复原力的野火使用可扩展的区域方法，和3）协调与利益相关者咨询小组开发决策支持系统，提供空间明确可行的行动，以增加当地，区域，和国家野火恢复能力。