新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Professor Emeritus takes a thoughtful look at where society should invest its wildfire solutions in an article published today (Dec. 20) in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
The article examines an often minimized piece of the wildfire challenge: the role of private property owners in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, and the mixture of information, incentives and penalties policymakers should consider to help them and their homes be more adapted and resilient to wildfire.
鈥淲e do not have a western wildfire crisis, we have a social crisis in the WUI revolving around ecosystems, management, climate change and fire,鈥 Schwartz said.
Most wildfires don鈥檛 take place in the forest but in the WUI. They often start there, too, with human ignitions that spread from private to public lands.
Increasingly, the most destructive fires aren鈥檛 in coniferous forests but in grasslands, shrub lands and woodlands that are adapted to and need fire to be healthy. However, homes in these areas are typically not adapted to wildfire.
Helping landowners establish defensible space and home hardening techniques 鈥 and creating the social change needed encourage those actions 鈥 could be a large step toward managing wildfire challenges.
鈥淭o begin, we must ask, 鈥楬ow we can create an environment that reduces the risk of loss of life and property damage when there are wildfires,鈥 rather than 鈥楬ow do we eliminate wildfires,鈥欌 writes Schwartz.
An excerpt:
We need a better understanding of what motivates people. Understanding the home hardening/insurance trade-off that landowners face is a key component of developing strategies to encourage hardening. Striving for policies that balance the roles of utilities, local governments and the insurance industry in helping homeowners increase fire resilience is also critical. Finally, society must grapple with social equitability issues when the cost of the challenge exceeds the capacity of many in society to bear.
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Media Resources
Kat Kerlin is an environmental science writer and media relations specialist at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis. She鈥檚 the editor of the 鈥What Can I Do About Climate Change?鈥 blog. kekerlin@ucdavis.edu.