Preparing for disaster: Raising awareness to reduce wildfire risks

In the summer of 2020, wildfire smoke covered Portland, Oregon, causing prolonged poor air quality and health issues for residents. The following year, the city faced a heatwave with temperatures reaching up to 116 degrees. 

These events underscored the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires and climate-related emergencies in the western United States due to the climate crisis.

Wildfire protection in the Pacific Northwest 

Already, Oregon has seen a significant rise in the number of fires from the previous year. At Portland State University (PSU), researchers are actively working to boost wildfire awareness, prevention, and mitigation in the Pacific Northwest. 

The team includes Max Nielsen-Pincus, Cody Evers (Environmental Science and Management), Brianne Suldovsky (Communication), and and Jonathan Fink (Geology). Each of these researchers are tackling the issue from different perspectives, reflecting the complexity of the issue. 

Challenges of wildfire mitigation 

Wildfire mitigation involves numerous stakeholders and interconnected agencies across local, state, tribal, and national governments.

One of the challenges, as associate professor Max Nielsen-Pincus explained, is “building bridges between the different agencies.” 

Jonathan Fink, a volcanologist and professor of geology, initiated the Cascadia Wildfire and Urban Smoke Working Group in 2019. This informal group includes researchers, policy experts, and technologists from the Pacific Northwest in both the US and Canada. 

So far, they have conducted 113 webinars on topics ranging from forest regeneration to the health effects of wildfire smoke, with all recordings publicly accessible.

Wildfire vulnerability of the Pacific Northwest 

The group also held an online symposium titled “Wildfire Knows No Borders” in the fall of 2020. During the spring 2024 term, Fink taught a course in the PSU Honors College on wildfire and smoke in the Pacific Northwest. 

Undergraduate students watched videos from the webinar series and generated questions about the content, which Fink then discussed with the original speakers who joined the class. 

This initiative helped students understand environmental hazards and provided opportunities to meet professionals and explore careers in science.

“Part of this project is getting people to realize that Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are particularly vulnerable to wildfire,” Fink said. 

“Even though we haven’t had major fires in the cities, if you look at tree ring data, there are huge fires that basically go through the entire basin and destroy all the trees, every three to six hundred years. Then the forest gets restarted. It’s kind of like the big earthquakes that happen here, every two to five hundred years.”

Preparing for fires in urban areas

One of the key takeaways from Fink’s webinar series is that city and county governments and other agencies need to be prepared for fires encroaching on urban areas. This could occur in Portland following an extended summer drought combined with winds blowing from the east, as happened in 2020.

Brianne Suldovsky, an associate professor of communication at PSU, studies public understanding of science and the environment. She co-authored a paper with Fink and Molly Baer Kramer of PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, surveying Portlanders about their perceived risk of wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate emergencies. 

The study, “Extreme heat & public perception in Portland, Oregon: Evidence of a compounding vulnerability effect for climate hazards,” published in PLOS Climate, examines perceptions of extreme heat risk, emergency response needs, and trust in first responders among Portland metro area residents.

Public perception of wildfire risk

The impetus for the study was the 2021 heat wave in Portland, which posed severe risks to residents and required effective communication of available resources. 

“Communicating risks is really complicated, because you have two things happening at once in terms of public perception: the first is whether or not they think a threat is real. Next, if they do believe the danger is real, do they think they can protect themselves against that threat?” Suldovsky said.

“And so when we’re talking about something like climate change or climate extremes, having people see that there’s a risk is one thing, but you also want to make sure they know how to protect themselves, or at least feel like they have the resources to do so.”

The study found that three vulnerability indicators – poverty, disability, and race – significantly influence public perception. The more of these indicators a person has, the more they expect to be harmed by extreme heat and environmental emergencies. 

The study also revealed that these groups have lower trust in first responders, though firefighters and medical providers were the most trusted across all vulnerability groups. 

The paper recommends increasing outreach to vulnerable groups before emergencies to establish lines of communication and anticipate their needs.

Reducing wildfire risks

Max Nielsen-Pincus, chair of PSU’s Environmental Science and Management (ESM) department, has been collaborating with Cody Evers on the project “Fueling Adaptation: Leveraging Community Capacity to Reduce Wildfire Risk.” 

This project, in partnership with the US Forest Service, focuses on understanding local and regional processes for adapting to wildfire in the western United States. 

“One of the challenges that we have as researchers, and more broadly, is that wildfire risk management doesn’t happen in any singular agency. It takes lots of different players to come to the table,” Nielsen-Pincus said.

The project team is developing case studies and guidelines for successful regional collaboration, with wildfire researchers from various universities working together to understand the impacts of wildfire mitigation better. Nielsen-Pincus acknowledges that wildfires can’t be completely prevented but emphasizes the importance of mitigation. 

“How can we create a landscape that is better adapted to wildfire so that the impacts are less, and recovery is easier?” he asked, noting that “there are many different strategies for doing this. There’s no single silver bullet.”

The role of prescribed fires 

One key mitigation strategy is prescribed burns – controlled fires that reduce the risk of larger, more destructive wildfires. Nielsen-Pincus and Evers are working with colleagues from other universities on a study exploring prescribed fire and the social dynamics of adaptation. 

FireNet, led by the University of Oregon, examines people’s attitudes and responses to prescribed fires and how managers can use successful outcomes to build public support for more mitigation work. 

“I think a lot of folks recognize that we need a lot more fire on the landscape – but in the right places and the right times of year – to mitigate and minimize those large, uncontrolled wildfires that happen in the wrong places at the wrong times of year,” Nielsen-Pincus said.

Resilience against cascading disasters 

By improving our understanding of and communication around these issues – among different agencies and between agencies and the public – researchers at PSU and other universities in the Pacific Northwest aim to enhance regional resilience against potential future “cascading disasters” such as wildfires, extreme heat, and other climate emergencies. 

Improving everyone’s understanding of the risks, treatments, and most effective strategies will help ensure that cities on the West Coast are prepared and resilient.

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