CIVIC-PG Track A: From Crisis to Opportunity: Addressing Rapidly Escalating Wildfire Risks on Colorado's Front Range through a Science-based Natural Climate Solutions Approach

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Protecting communities from catastrophic fire while concurrently working on solutions that can mitigate global warming and benefit biological diversity is the topic of this project organized by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Sustainable Landscapes and Communities. The team that includes civic leaders, stakeholders, and academics will assess the potential impact of local pilot projects that can minimize the threat of catastrophic fire in both built and natural communities. Such actions have concurrent impacts and possible benefits to ecological characteristics such as biological diversity and soil fertility, and could reduce greenhouse gases. The crux of this effort is to develop actionable science activities that can be implemented immediately at little cost by both public and private entities. These actions focus on the local and regional value of ‘green solutions,’ nature-based actions that can increase community resilience and benefit the physical and mental wellbeing of stakeholders. This project addresses catastrophic fire prevention and climate solutions. Among the deliverables of this project are the prioritization of the highest impact natural climate solutions to be developed to support wildfire mitigation. These include a synthesis of public and private land management best practices for wildfire resilience based on observed behaviors of fire under different land management/land use scenarios within local or geographically analogous settings. The project is developing a framework for conducting a full cost/benefit analysis of priority natural climate solutions, including both the carbon/climate stabilization benefits and the related climate resilience benefits (reduced temperatures, increased storm water infiltration, reduced energy consumption). An assessment of the impacts from land management practices to soil health, and insect and bird diversity and abundance will be conducted by combining and analyzing data sets from partner research projects, ecology surveys on natural land, and urban community science surveys. In all cases, recognizing stakeholder limitations to implementation will be included in evaluations. Of considerable interest, assessment of actions in terms of effects on other actions will be highlighted. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.