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Please enter at least three discussion questions based upon the assigned readings (and mapping effort, if you are interested). Spring Break made this week a bit of an oddity in terms of reporting questions, and I hope it wasn't looming over you during your time off. For that reason, please have your comments uploaded by Monday evening at 5 p.m. (we will return to our normal due date of noon on Monday during future classes).
See you all on Wednesday.
Paveglio et al mention that some properties are considered at lower “risk” because they are lower in economic value (435). This would indicate that those with the largest, most expensive homes have “the most” to lose; we all know this is not true. How can the concept of risk be mobilized to prioritize values that are not solely economic? Could broadened the definition of risk lead to a different idea of what fire “adaptation” means?
ReplyDeleteIn Paveglio et al, the definition of social vulnerability includes “the way humans create conditions that expose them to additional hazard” (426). Yet, Witgil et al raise important questions of who bears the cost of wildfire risk, underscoring the misleading nature of that definition: in our culture, historically and to the present day, it mostly the case that certain humans create conditions that expose certain OTHER humans to additional hazard. How does the “facilitation” of a “fire-adapted” WUI perpetuate environmental injustices and social vulnerabilities that are not addressed in these studies?
Witgil et al modeled a broad-scale study across the US, while Paveglio et al conducted a fine-scale study of one city in Idaho. What kind of scale is most appropriate to address social vulnerability to wildfire, especially given the non-localized costs of smoke exposure and tax-payer-subsidized mitigation and suppression efforts?
Wigtil et al.
ReplyDelete“Although social vulnerability indices can efficiently describe broad-scale vulnerability, they also can fail to capture more localized information related to exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity…” Did you notice any areas within the social vulnerability& wildfire risk map (Figure 4) that had results you did not expect? If you are familiar with the area, what are the “localized” factors that may have been overlooked in this broad scale analysis?
Paveglio et al.
E(RWL) as a metric for risk from wildfire incorporates the monetary value of the parcel and structures, as well as aesthetic value. What other values could be incorporated into this metric? Is it realistic to quantitatively analyze other values that could be affected in a wildfire?
E(RWL) also uses survey responses to calculate how likely a residential structure is to burn, based on the reported amount of fuel reduction done. How objectively do residents in the WUI represent their own efforts to reduce fuel loads on their property?
Wildfire Risk to Communities
What were your observations regarding scale and useful information in the interactive mapping tools? My initial look at several communities in Idaho left me with a sense that larger population centers surrounded by WUI areas may benefit from this tool, while smaller more rural communities may not benefit from the information.
Wilgil et al. mentioned there were seven wildfire potential values used such as very low, low, moderate, high, very high, water, and non-burnable. I wondered of the reasoning of categorizing “water” and “non-burnable together, have these two been categorized similarly in previous studies. Another question I had focuses on the respondents that were either Hispanic or Native American that only spoke their native language; was there any translator for these individuals? If there wasn’t a translator, at this time was there important information that was not correctly understood? The last question I have for this paper is more thinking generally if any of the 32,000 of 131 million that weren’t included in this study, I wondered how the results would have been affected by this inclusion.
ReplyDeletePaveglio et al. mentioned that previous studies indicate second homeowners have less motivation or are less likely to perform mitigations on their alternative properties. Were these homeowners aware of the dangerous risks both themselves and surrounding community members if mitigation actions weren’t performed? Also, it mentioned the developed and designated downtown of the city from geographic region 1 because the few residential properties in the area weren’t in direct proximity to wildland vegetation that could influence wildfire spread. What was the amount of wildland vegetation accounted for would qualify to become a part of the study? The last question(s) I have is focused on the mail surveys which were administered to the primary residence of property owners with secondary residences within the study area. What were the difficulties with these mail surveys, was it more difficult to contact these homeowners since it wasn’t their primary residence? Did any of these homeowners reach out with questions they may have if they didn’t understand the survey correctly?
Witgil et al.’s finding that wildfire potential is negatively correlated with social vulnerability suggests to me that high wildfire potential, as human risk, is not cost prohibitive to low social vulnerability WUI expansion. Does this mean that WUI wildfire suppression can be understood as a form of ‘transfer payment’ whereby government income and resources are redistributed to areas of low vulnerability (higher capital) without the expectation of goods and services in return?
ReplyDeleteMore practical follow up question: If firefighting/suppression is a federal transfer payment that socializes the development of high risk/low vulnerability areas, what’s the argument against categorizing high fire potential WUI as a tax block in order to pay their fair share of the firefighting costs?
In terms of understanding social vulnerability, heterogeneity at finer scales (Paveglio et al.) and homogeneity at broader scales (Witgil et al.) may both be true. This question is a variation on the one about scale asked by Sasha: At what scale does wildfire go from a social-environmental problem to a problem of social-environmental (in)justice?
Paveglio et al found that high-value properties correlated with higher social vulnerability in McCall (435). What might have influenced this correlation which contrasts with traditional hazard literature?
ReplyDeletePaveglio et al mentions the possibility using taxation as a discincentive for private property owners to promote mitigation activities (436). Should the same be done for part-time homeowners or even the entire population?
Witigel et al evaluated the entire coterminous U.S, including WUI and non-WUI, areas. Does this scale lead to a loss of definition social vulnurability for small communities who do not reflect the greater population? What are the drawbacks of modeling social vulnerability using entirely second order data?
In the Wigtil et al paper it was mentioned in the discussion section that development in the WUI has been incentivized, and only feasible for advantaged populations to comply with restrictions. How often are those restrictions on things such as building materials put and kept in place more as a way to gatekeep access to a community than as a genuine effort to provide fire protection? They also mention that social vulnerability is highly context specific and that more direct post fire measures have not been widely studied. I am wondering what that would look like, how much of that data needs to be collected as an area recovers from a fire? Would it be feasible to look back and collect a clear picture of the effects of vulnerability years or decades after the fact as a way to test the accuracy of the social vulnerability predictions?
ReplyDeleteI think the wildfirerisk.org website is interesting. When looking at the methods page I was somewhat unclear on how often and in what ways the data is updated. I feel like this cite offers a useful tool for planning but only if it is updated consistently to reflect the current situation. It appears the social vulnerability data is from 2016-2020, I would hypothesize some changes to the social vulnerability situation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.