CAREER: Understanding the Role of Citizen Engagement and Multidirectional Information Exchange in Community Resilience to Wildfires

该学院早期职业发展项目的目标是促进对公民参与和多方向信息交流在增强社区对野火的复原力方面的作用的基本了解。近几十年来，由于气候变化、荒地-城市交界处人类活动的增加以及土地利用的变化，野火对人类、已建成环境和生态系统的威胁越来越大。虽然联邦、州和地方政府已经制定和实施了风险管理战略，以减少大型野火的频率和负面影响，但这些战略往往基于对野火风险的静态、过时和粗略的估计。此外，他们不经常让公民参与，因为他们的行动对减少财产损失至关重要，他们的保护努力影响到其邻居和周围环境的风险水平。在灾害多发的社区，缺乏持续的公民参与和有限的信息流，这对政府官员和个人作出知情的最佳决策构成了障碍。这一职业项目旨在整合火灾科学、风险评估原则和决策过程，为野火风险评估和管理的新方法奠定基础，该方法随着时间的推移而演变，并捕获在多个时空尺度上发生的相关变化。这一集成方法围绕着一个动态、互动的下一代社区野火保护计划(CWPP)平台展开，该平台促进了积极的公民参与和多方向的信息交流。该项目为学生、从业者、政策制定者和公众提供了机会，通过新的学术课程、培训课程和在线展览，增进他们对野火风险的理解，并为减轻其负面影响做出贡献。这一职业项目推动了从传统的静态野火风险评估和管理计划向动态、互动平台的转变，该平台(A)允许公民与当地政府和邻居参与缓解决策过程，(B)使政府和公民能够通过多方向的信息交流，就缓解野火做出联合风险知情决策。该项目首先建立了一个进化博弈论模型，以刻画相互依存的野火风险背景下政府和公民之间的决策。然后，它开发了一个风险评估模型，该模型使用随时间推移进行的数据收集和处理。最后，本项目将这些模型和工具集成到一个原型CWPP平台中，以在征求用户反馈的同时论证其技术可行性和成本效益。通过促进地方政府和公民之间的合作，该项目有可能帮助将减少灾害风险的责任从应急人员转移到整个社区。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to advance a fundamental understanding of the role of citizen engagement and multidirectional information exchange in enhancing community resilience to wildfires. In recent decades, wildfires have become an increasing threat to humans, the built environment, and ecosystems due to climate change, increased human activities at the wildland-urban interface, and changes in land use. While federal, state, and local governments have developed and implemented risk management strategies to reduce the frequency and negative impact of large wildfires, these strategies are often based on static, outdated, and coarse-scale estimates of wildfire risk. Moreover, they do not often engage citizens whose actions are crucial for reducing damage at the property level and whose protective efforts affect the risk levels of their neighbors and the surrounding environment. A lack of sustained citizen engagement and limited information flows in hazard-prone communities presents a barrier to informed, optimal decision-making by both government officials and individuals. This CAREER project aims to integrate fire science, risk assessment principles, and decision-making processes to establish the foundation for a new approach to wildfire risk assessment and management that evolves over time and captures relevant changes occurring at multiple spatial-temporal scales. This integrated approach centers around a dynamic, interactive, next-generation Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) platform that facilitates active citizen engagement and multidirectional information exchange. The project provides students, practitioners, policymakers, and the public with opportunities to advance their understanding of wildfire risks and contribute to mitigating its negative impacts through new academic courses, training sessions, and an online exhibition. This CAREER project stimulates a paradigm shift from traditional, static wildfire risk assessment and management plans to a dynamic, interactive platform that (a) allows citizens to engage with their local governments and neighbors in mitigation decision processes and (b) enables both governments and citizens to make joint risk-informed decisions about wildfire mitigation through multidirectional information exchanges. This project first builds an evolutionary game-theoretic model to characterize decision-making between governments and citizens in interdependent wildfire risk contexts. It then develops a risk assessment model that employs ongoing data collection and processing over time. Finally, this project integrates these models and tools into a prototype CWPP platform to demonstrate its technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness while soliciting user feedback. By fostering collaboration between local governments and citizens, the project has the potential to aid the transition of the responsibility for disaster risk reduction from emergency personnel to that of the entire community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.