Wildfires, Communities & Climate Change

CHALLENGES FACING HUMAN COMMUNITIES AND FORESTS
Forests and communities in the US West face an existential crisis. Each year, as forests become drier and thicker with vegetation and development encroaches further into forested areas, wildfires grow larger, more frequent, and more damaging. How will forests acclimate to the increasing pace and scale of fires, and regenerate in a warmer, drier climate? How will human communities function under heightened risk and access the ecosystem services they have come to rely on? How will it be possible to thin forests, fight fires, harden infrastructure, and slow climate change at sufficient scales under current markets, technologies, and policies?

OPPORTUNITY TO ADDRESS A COMPLEX SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL PROBLEM
The problems that western forests and communities face are multi-faceted with ecological, technical, economic, social, and political dimensions. While at times these problems seem intractable, a heightened sense of urgency is driving scientists and practitioners to search harder for solutions. Many new state and non-state actors have emerged to help forests and communities adapt, complementing work by traditional agencies and organizations. Now, a new administration offers the opportunity to address climate change as a policy matter, reinstate and implement environmental regulations, and reach out to rural areas with a positive economic agenda. However, to be effective over the long term and on large scales, strategies must account for complex synergistic relationships between forest, fire, climate, and community dynamics.

THE WESTERN FOREST AND FIRE INITIATIVE AT UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The Western Forest and Fire Initiative (WFFI) is an interdisciplinary working group of faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows at University of Michigan working in close collaboration with practitioners in the US West. Our goals are to:
• Improve understanding of the problematic relationship between wildfire, forests, and communities in a changing climate as a complex adaptive social-ecological system (SES).
• Contribute to the development of better ways to manage this SES to reduce the risk of large wildfires, improve the vitality of human communities, and help society adapt to climate change.
We plan to pursue these goals through transdisciplinary research; as researchers and practitioners working across disciplines to create new theories, methods, and applications. Over the next three years, we will pursue four interrelated objectives:
1. Understand the west-side network of stakeholders working at the intersection of the critical domains of the SES: forest, fire, climate, and communities.
2. Serve that network through applied research on ecological, economic, technical, behavioral, and policy problems that stakeholders identify as in critical need of attention.
3. Build capacity of future western SES scholars through education and training.
4. Create a robust long-term research agenda and set of strategies for policy and management changes.

NETWORK ENGAGEMENT AND APPLIED RESEARCH
Work by the WFFI will take place along two tracks: network engagement, and applied research. We will:
1. Use quantitative network analysis to understand and identify opportunities for collaboration among organizations and individuals working at the intersection of forests, wildfire, communities, and climate.
2. Convene and engage thought leaders from the network in an iterative interactive co-production process to identify critical challenges that would benefit from interdisciplinary applied research.
3. Undertake five rigorous analyses of applied research problems relating to these critical challenges to improve scientific understanding of the social-ecological system and how to manage it.
4. Work with thought leaders to incorporate findings from the problem analyses into a robust agenda for future research and a set of strategies for policy and management change.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN’S ROLE
University of Michigan is uniquely well-positioned to catalyze innovative solutions to the crisis facing forests and communities in the US West not only because of the faculty’s scholarly excellence in critical disciplines, but also precisely because the institution exists outside the West. Drawing on faculty members’ experiences working on similarly complex social-ecological issues around the US and the World, University of Michigan can bring fresh ideas and synthesized knowledge to bear on the problems facing western forests and communities.

Video created by Eric Shaw, Communications Manager, Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Michigan.