A new wildfire risk assessment tool that takes social vulnerability into account indicates more than 400 communities in the Pacific Northwest are at greater risk than previously thought.
However, researchers at Oregon State University and The Nature Conservancy say their assessment tool could inform fair distribution of risk reduction resources.
Andy McEvoy of the OSU College of Forestry led the creation of the tool, which integrates social vulnerability with factors such as structure density and environmental hazard and was presented in Environmental Research Letters.
Among the communities whose risk level increased are the Oregon towns of Cave Junction, La Pine and Glendale and the Washington towns of Selah, White Salmon and Ellensburg.
The researchers found that Northwest communities with both high wildfire hazard and high social vulnerability tended to be small - having fewer than 5,000 buildings - and were mainly in the drier portions of the region. Examples of communities in need of higher prioritization by funding allocators include Warm Springs, Oregon, and Goldendale, Washington.
"Warm Springs and Goldendale have slightly lower wildfire exposure than some nearby, better-resourced communities like Bend and Leavenworth, but they experience greater social vulnerability and therefore are likely to experience greater impacts if a fire occurred," said co-author Chris Dunn, also of the College of Forestry. "By blending a mix of factors, our assessment method is a path toward more equitable investments in community wildfire risk reduction."
Social vulnerability refers to community characteristics that partially influence capacity to withstand and recover from events such as wildfires, floods and earthquakes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses data categorized under four themes - socioeconomic status, household characteristics, racial and ethnic minority status, and housing type and transportation - in its social vulnerability index.
"This tool balances the important element of social vulnerability with wildfire exposure, highlighting communities that are experiencing a relatively high degree of both," Dunn said. "In a paper published in 2024 by OSU researchers, we observed that a lack of investment in mitigation and fire suppression resources led to more fire impacts in socially vulnerable communities - even when their other risk factors were comparatively low. The new tool is a huge step forward for allocating risk mitigation funds in a more equitable and effective way."
The authors explain that the level of wildfire impact on a community depends on a variety of factors including its firefighting capacity, the surrounding landscape and the characteristics of its "home ignition zones" - i.e., how much flammable material is in close proximity to buildings.
Prefire mitigation, smoke management plans, wildfire response and postfire recovery are a function of a community's access to resources and its level of participation in wildfire management networks, the researchers say.
"Despite official and unofficial demands that social vulnerability be better accounted for in wildfire mitigation decision making, there have been few decision-support tools to help with that," McEvoy said. "The current tools don't really factor in a community's demographic and socioeconomic data."
The researchers applied their novel tool, which integrates a social vulnerability index with a quantitative wildfire risk assessment, to 1,005 communities in the Northwest. Almost half of them, 459, were shown to be at greater risk than the quantitative assessment alone indicated. Based on the new tool, 26 would be elevated to the "priority" status for receiving funding for risk mitigation measures such as education, planning and fuels reduction.
Those 26 include Ephrata, Washington, and White Swan, Washington.
"Communities experiencing less social vulnerability often have the capacity and resources needed to apply for and make use of publicly funded mitigation," McEvoy said. "The many communities across the Northwest that are experiencing high social vulnerability have less capacity and fewer resources - but that doesn't mean they aren't facing the same risk, or even greater."
For 541 communities in the study, risk level went down when social vulnerability was included in the equation. The largest decreases in risk were seen in communities with the highest per-capita income.
Seventy-four communities were considered priority communities with or without taking social vulnerability into account; all are in regions categorized as high hazard.
"Oregon and Washington communities increasingly see the direct impacts of extreme wildfire on people and the forests that support them, and these datasets reveal which communities experience the greatest wildfire risk and are under-resourced for fire preparedness and recovery," said co-author Kerry Metlen of The Nature Conservancy. "Using these data will facilitate more effective local partnerships to restore resilient landscapes, help communities adapt and develop smoke management plans that will allow forests and people of the Pacific Northwest to thrive."
The U.S. Forest Service funded the study.
Journalists are welcome to contact the Oregon State researchers directly via the information listed at the top of this news release. Journalists wishing to follow up with Metlen are asked to email Tripp Crouse at [email protected].
