Building Wildfire Resiliency in California
Leveraging nature’s power to protect people from the threat of natural disasters
The Problem: The escalation of wildfires in California poses an increasing threat to communities.
The 2018 Camp Fire decimated the City of Paradise, claiming 85 lives, destroying over 18,000 structures, and causing billions of dollars in damage. It quickly became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history.
With rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns in California, climate change is already causing more frequent and catastrophic wildfires. The drier conditions create an ideal environment for the ignition of wildfires, and a longer dry season means more opportunities for fires to occur, to last longer, and be more destructive.
We’re already experiencing the disastrous wildfires caused by climate change that scientists had predicted would not begin until the middle of the century. In 2020, wildfires burned the largest area of land on record in California – over 4 million acres from 9,000 individual fires – doubling the previous record of 1.8 million acres set in 2018.
Building residential areas adjacent to, and in, fire-prone wildlands (also known as the wildland-urban interface) creates an interaction that can be disastrous to communities—and the impacts of a changing climate only serve to increase the frequency, intensity, and extent of the damage.
About 40% of California’s land is designated as high fire risk, and currently, more than 10 million people live within the high-risk wildland-urban interface. On top of destroying the natural environment and releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, these wildfires can devastate entire communities.
Over the next 50 years, as suburban development sprawls further into high fire risk zones, and as existing at-risk communities increase in population density, more people will be exposed to wildfires with potentially disastrous consequences.
After wildfires occur, many policy and funding paradigms in California put pressure on communities like Paradise to rebuild in place, pushing to get things “back to normal,” potentially putting people at risk of future wildfires. Instead, with proactive pre- and post-disaster planning, there is an opportunity to build real resilience in communities like Paradise, and communities across California, using nature to protect people from future risk of wildfires and other natural disasters.
The Solution: Restoring natural landscapes can mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Beyond wildfires, other natural disasters have well-established nature-based resilience strategies, with proven resilience and long-term financial benefits. With sea level rise, wetlands and other coastal habitats reduce the impact of storm surges and can protect communities from flooding. During Hurricane Sandy, coastal wetlands in New York and New Jersey offered protection against the storm, avoiding more than $600 million in damages to some seaside homes. With inland flooding, the restoration of natural floodplains can protect communities from riverine flooding, and TNC California has worked on this for over 20 years.
Preventing development along the Santa Clara River floodplain is estimated to avoid over $1 billion in flood damage costs. The natural floodplain also provides added benefits of wildlife habitat, freshwater supply, and support for the local farming economy.
Similarly, along the Sacramento River, TNC’s action to replace a substandard private levee with a natural setback levee, which is nine times more likely to contain a 75-year flood event, protects the nearby community from flooding and reduces expected flood damage by $577,000 each year.
TNC seeks to demonstrate how nature can similarly protect people from the threat of wildfires. In the Sierra Nevada, careful ecological forest management (e.g., prescribed fires, targeted forest thinning) can reduce the high fuel loads and help make forests more resilient to large-scale wildfires.
In urban areas, common property-scale fire resilient activities aren’t nature-based – but are vital to keeping people safe. The California Fire Safe Council recommends “maintaining defensible space” and “hardening your home” by removing combustible items surrounding your property and building with fire-resistant materials. Thinking beyond traditional fire-proofing methods, TNC is exploring the opportunity for nature-based community-scale approaches to fire resilience.
Resilience Parks
Establishing open green space is a nature-based solution that may mitigate future fire risk for communities. In a high-speed wind-driven fire, the fire can spread in two ways: at the downwind front of the flame and by burning embers that are carried by the wind. When wind-blown embers travel downwind from high wildland fire risk areas, downwind urban areas are at high risk of fire damage.
Carefully managed natural buffer zones may act as ember catchers, disrupting the spread of the fire from short-range embers. Establishing buffers – open space between the likely sources of wildfires and the denser urban communities – may reduce the fuel load and limit the spread of wildfires, ultimately protecting communities from ignitions from wildland fires. These wildfire risk reduction buffer zones are called “Resilience Parks.”
Resilience parks can also provide staging areas and mustering areas for first responders and community members. In addition, they can serve as shelter-in-place areas during a fire when evacuation is impeded.
In addition to mitigating the impacts of natural disasters, the multi-benefit resilience parks will also allow communities to enjoy the benefits open spaces provide, offering recreation opportunities and conservation benefits.
Resilience Parks in Action: Demonstrating the benefits of nature-based solutions in Paradise
As Paradise’s long-term recovery plan from the Camp Fire begins to take shape, TNC is partnering with the Paradise Recreation and Park District to investigate the feasibility of establishing resilience parks as part of a community-scale risk reduction plan, creating a greenbelt around the town that may serve as a protective buffer between people and the wildlands.
Partnerships
Strong partnerships are vital to the successful implementation of resilience parks.
In Paradise, the TNC Disaster Resilience team brought technical, scientific, policy, and fundraising support to this project, working with the Paradise Recreation and Park District (PRPD) to find nature-based approaches to integrate into a longer-term community redevelopment vision.
As a landowner across a large swath of Butte County that was affected by the Camp Fire, PRPD was the first entity to consider the idea of repurposing burnt properties for Resilience Parks , and is well positioned to play a leading role in creating new approaches to land management that will reduce the long-term risk of fire while providing exciting conservation and recreation opportunities. PRPD will execute transactions, protect lands, and provide long-term stewardship. These partners will be aided by funding from FEMA's new BRIC program .
Strategy to Place Resilience Parks
To determine the ideal placement and size for resilience parks in Paradise, TNC invested in a technical analysis led by the Conservation Biology Institute to help PRPD prioritize which parcels to focus on. The locations considered are lots that were formerly developed and impacted by the Camp Fire, and the highest priority parcels maximize both risk reduction and conservation values. The goal is to turn these areas into a connected network of parks that provide fire risk reduction, recreation, and habitat conservation.
Comparison of ignition risk of land in Paradise with no risk management (left) vs. with resilience parks in priority locations (right). Establishing resilience parks in these regions (circled in green) can reduce the high ignition risk area by 64%.
Looking beyond Paradise, the ultimate goal is to develop a replicable model of nature-based wildfire risk reduction and showcase the protective benefits that resilience parks may provide to communities. By demonstrating that open space protection may be a tool for community risk reduction in Paradise, we can effectively make the case to state and federal agencies and legislators that incentives and funding for disaster mitigation and response can and should align with conservation and recreation goals. Doing so may result in more fire-resilient communities throughout California and allow managers to proactively plan ahead for future impacts of climate change.
Watch the video below to learn more about the Camp Fire and TNC’s strategies to rebuild a more resilient Paradise.
What You Can Do: Establish resilience parks to protect your community from wildfires.
1. Determine priority areas for resilience parks in your community.
With GIS analysis, you can develop a fire risk probability model to determine which parcels surrounding your city are at the highest risk of fire ignition. By comparing fire risk with wind and land ownership data, and by identifying corresponding opportunities to achieve co-benefits for conservation, you can prioritize which parcels are most suitable to become resilience parks.
2. Apply to FEMA for funding.
FEMA's BRIC Program offers funding for local communities to implement pre-disaster hazard mitigation projects.
