CAREER: Understanding the Role of Citizen Engagement and Multidirectional Information Exchange in Community Resilience to Wildfires

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to advance a fundamental understanding of the role of citizen engagement and multidirectional information exchange in enhancing community resilience to wildfires. In recent decades, wildfires have become an increasing threat to humans, the built environment, and ecosystems due to climate change, increased human activities at the wildland-urban interface, and changes in land use. While federal, state, and local governments have developed and implemented risk management strategies to reduce the frequency and negative impact of large wildfires, these strategies are often based on static, outdated, and coarse-scale estimates of wildfire risk. Moreover, they do not often engage citizens whose actions are crucial for reducing damage at the property level and whose protective efforts affect the risk levels of their neighbors and the surrounding environment. A lack of sustained citizen engagement and limited information flows in hazard-prone communities presents a barrier to informed, optimal decision-making by both government officials and individuals. This CAREER project aims to integrate fire science, risk assessment principles, and decision-making processes to establish the foundation for a new approach to wildfire risk assessment and management that evolves over time and captures relevant changes occurring at multiple spatial-temporal scales. This integrated approach centers around a dynamic, interactive, next-generation Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) platform that facilitates active citizen engagement and multidirectional information exchange. The project provides students, practitioners, policymakers, and the public with opportunities to advance their understanding of wildfire risks and contribute to mitigating its negative impacts through new academic courses, training sessions, and an online exhibition. This CAREER project stimulates a paradigm shift from traditional, static wildfire risk assessment and management plans to a dynamic, interactive platform that (a) allows citizens to engage with their local governments and neighbors in mitigation decision processes and (b) enables both governments and citizens to make joint risk-informed decisions about wildfire mitigation through multidirectional information exchanges. This project first builds an evolutionary game-theoretic model to characterize decision-making between governments and citizens in interdependent wildfire risk contexts. It then develops a risk assessment model that employs ongoing data collection and processing over time. Finally, this project integrates these models and tools into a prototype CWPP platform to demonstrate its technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness while soliciting user feedback. By fostering collaboration between local governments and citizens, the project has the potential to aid the transition of the responsibility for disaster risk reduction from emergency personnel to that of the entire community. 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.