Community-Based Wildfire Management: Lessons Learned from Community Forestry

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Community-Based Wildfire Management Lessons
Learned from Community Forestry

• Cecilia Danks
• Watershed Research and Training Center,
• Hayfork, California, USA
• and
• University of Vermont
• Burlington, Vermont, USA

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Issue Wildfires are a serious and growing
problem in the US.

• In 2000
• 3,000,000 hectares of wildlands burned
• US 2 billion was spent to fight forest fires
• billions in losses of property and resources
• human lives lost

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Community forestry provides lessons for how to
manage wildfire in a way that has social,
economic and ecological benefits -- for forest
communities and the nation as a whole. The US
has learned from community forestry efforts
abroad -- through visits, exchanges and
individuals.
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Features US forest communities share with those
in other countries

• Physically isolated
• High poverty and underemployment
• Dependent on forest for livelihood
• Limited capital
• Small businesses
• Resourceful people with knowledge of local
  forests

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Community Forestry means that local communities

• share in
• Decision-making
• Benefits

• contribute to
• Labor
• Expertise

To achieve Social Well-being and Environmental
Health
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Community Forestry in the USA Participatory /
Small Business Model
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Community Forestry in the UScontinued

• Labor
• Expertise

• Community-based businesses contract with the
  Forest Service
• Jobs in extraction and processing of forest
  products
• Direct employment with agencies
• Local knowledge
• History of past experiences

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Research Results on Community Employment in
National Forests

• Importance of
• Small scale (for small crews)
• Consistency available every year
• Commitments long in duration
• Intermediate skills, technology, capital
• For community-based businesses to compete and
  communities to benefit

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Two Components of Managing Wildfire

• Suppressing fire
• Large scale activity
• Irregular in any one place
• Short duration
• High levels of skill, technology, and capital

• Managing fuels
• Small scale actions across the landscape
• Consistent, annual work
• Long-term activity
• Intermediate skills, technology, and capital

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Currently, Little ? Managing fuels
(prevention) Most ? Fire
suppression (fighting fires) Communities are
left out. Fire threat continues to grow. Need
BOTH!
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Community-based Wildfire Management
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Community-based Wildfire Management

• Labor
• Expertise

• Mapping, planning, research
• Extraction and processing the by-products of
  fuels reduction
• Value-added industries
• Direct employment with agencies
• Prescribed burning small scale firefighting
• Fire history, weather patterns
• Access points, water sources

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Contrasting Approaches to Fire Management
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Contrasting Approaches to Fire Management

• Current
• Centralized capacity to respond
• Outside experts
• Mobile, specialized crews

• Community-based
• Decentralized capacity to manage
• Local knowledge
• Place-based, multipurpose crews

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Policies to Enable Community-based Wildfire
Management

• Invest in both approaches to managing fire
  fire-fighting and fuels management
• Field project implementation
• Skills training and industry development
• Pay attention to scale and consistency to involve
  communities and their local skills and knowledge
• Encourage utilization of by-products of fuels
  management

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Community Meeting on Active Fire Near Town