Significance

As the size and intensity of wildfire in the United States increases, managing wildfire will require addressing multiple interconnected impacts. Most Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) prioritize the built environment and human health, with less attention to wildfire’s impacts on the economy, natural environment, or cultural services. Plans do not reflect the unique circumstances of wildfire vulnerability in a specific place, nor do they incorporate new federal policy updates. At best, they reflect ideas discussed in broad popular discourse. Community planning for wildfire across the United States is not aligned with wildfire risk or federal guidance; communities remain vulnerable to wildfire because best practices for effective planning are not being followed.

Abstract

To mitigate the potential impacts of wildfire, communities across the United States are engaging in collaborative wildfire risk mitigation planning. Planning involves identifying a set of goals, developing management strategies to achieve those goals, and codifying the goals and strategies in a written document. A plan’s goals and strategies are informed by values—the things plan authors and communities want to protect or enhance. Identifying and evaluating these values can give insight into whether a plan is meeting the needs of local wildfire risk and vulnerability, incorporating best practice from national policies, or simply reflecting broader cultural trends. This paper explores these tensions using the case of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs), which are local (neighborhood to multicounty) plans developed collaboratively by diverse wildfire-related stakeholders. Drawing on a combination of manual coding and computational text analysis, we first characterize the values to be protected in 2268 CWPPs from across the United States. We then evaluate what shapes the values articulated in individual CWPPs, exploring the degree to which values reflect local wildfire risk and socioeconomic vulnerability, updates in policy guidance from US federal agencies, and/or broader cultural trends. This paper makes three primary contributions: 1) mapping local wildfire values at the national scale; 2) understanding tensions in environmental governance in a multilevel federalist system; and 3) advancing values as an important metric for evaluating the quality of management plans.

Managing wildfire is challenging. US federal agencies spent an average of $2.9 billion annually on wildfire suppression between 2019 and 2023 (1), with state, local, and private entities also spending a significant (uncounted) amount. Nonetheless, losses from fires have increased steadily (2) alongside the size and intensity of fires (3–5). As wildfire risk management practitioners increasingly recognize the need for new and adaptive approaches for addressing wildfire (6, 7), communities across the United States are engaging in wildfire planning. Planning involves identifying a set of goals, developing management strategies to achieve those goals, and codifying the goals and strategies in a written document (8, 9). A plan’s goals and strategies should reflect a community’s priorities and values; indeed, the American Institute of Certified Planners code of ethics dictates that planners “Identify social and cultural values which should be preserved as well as natural elements” (10). In community wildfire plans, which are often not written by professional planners, these priorities are often expressed as “assets,” “values to be protected,” or “values at risk” (hereafter “values”), which are concrete things a plan aims to protect or enhance (11).

This paper analyzes the values stated in community wildfire plans. Understanding the things people impacted by wildfire want to protect is critical for designing management approaches that match those values (12, 13) and is an important component of plan quality (14). The scope of values articulated in a plan can also provide insight into how wildfire is being managed and potential gaps in selected protection strategies (15). The way a policy problem is framed often dictates what management approaches are considered (16, 17), and there are numerous potential narratives about the causes and consequences of wildfire (18, 19). If a plan focuses only on protecting infrastructure while not mentioning public health, there is likely less attention paid to preventing smoke exposure or other health impacts, suggesting a need for additional policies or management actions if health becomes a policy priority. Without recognizing the complex, multidimensional nature of wildfire, plans risk developing mitigation strategies that overlook key impacts or populations (20–22).

What comprises a “good” set of values? In a federalist system like the United States, there are multiple potential sources of plan content: Plans may reflect local needs and discretion, or they may reflect higher-level policies or incentives. Each source of influence comes with strengths and weaknesses. The concept of social–ecological fit argues that governance structures are most effective when they match the scale and context of a specific social–ecological system (23–25). To achieve social–ecological fit, values should match the specific types of wildfires that occur and characteristics of the impacted communities in a particular place. For instance, a community with an economy driven by logging should express different values to be protected than a community with a large population of retirees (26). If both places developed plans based on the same values, the proposed management strategies might not be tailored to their specific needs and therefore may be ineffective at protecting the community.

At the same time, including values that reflect larger-scale priorities like those set by national governments can have strategic advantages. In many countries, national government agencies have substantially more capacity than local communities (27–29). Their policy priorities are therefore better able to reflect the newest updates in science as well as address regional, national, or global scale problems that require larger collective action (e.g., climate change), and they can draw on more financial resources to support the implementation of such policies. Community-driven management may be slow to incorporate these changes, leading to slower transformation of the system overall.

Finally, rather than reflecting either local needs or national priorities, plans may simply reflect the general cultural imagination of the time they were written. Social movements, media discourse, and popular culture all shape what people are thinking and talking about (30, 31). As plans are written in a particular historical moment, the cultural zeitgeist of that time may shape the values and priorities encoded in the plans; for instance, a value may appear in a plan because the author read a newspaper article discussing that value. While the zeitgeist can reflect widely held concerns, these concerns may not reflect the needs of specific places nor the particularities of wildfire.

This paper explores these possible sources of plan values using the case of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) in the United States. CWPPs are local plans, developed for jurisdictions ranging from neighborhoods to multicounty areas through collaborative processes that bring together diverse wildfire-related stakeholders (32). CWPPs were introduced in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003. The primary objective of CWPPs is to enhance collaboration between local governments, state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health. CWPPs allow communities to identify and prioritize areas for hazardous fuel reduction treatments and recommend measures to reduce structural ignitability throughout the at-risk community. CWPPs also aim to strengthen emergency management preparedness and response, as well as promote community awareness and education about wildfire risks. CWPPs require approval by “the applicable local government, local fire department, and State agency responsible for forest management, in consultation with interested parties and the Federal land management agencies managing land in the vicinity of the at-risk community” (16 USC § 6511). In practice, the size and makeup of the group of participating organizations varies substantially across individual CWPPs, and the authors themselves can be fire departments, local governments, state forestry departments, or professional consultants (32). Once a community has a CWPP in place, they are eligible to apply for federal funding through the Community Wildfire Defense Grant (CWDG) Program. See SI Text for more details on the specific requirements and incentives associated with CWPPs.

The various sources of plan values also reflect concerns about performative planning, wherein plans are developed for tactical purposes rather than to solve a policy problem (8, 33, 34). Plans that only reflect higher-level requirements, rather than local context, may indicate that their authors are simply checking boxes as baseline compliance. Such plans may be less likely to be implemented and therefore affect wildfire resilience. As CWPPs are voluntary in many states, yet required for funding, tactical compliance may be common.

Drawing on a combination of manual coding and computational text analysis, we first characterize the values to be protected from a new dataset of 2268 CWPPs from across the United States. We then evaluate what shapes the values articulated in individual CWPPs, exploring whether values reflect local dynamics of wildfire risk and socioeconomic vulnerability, updates in policy guidance from US federal agencies, and/or broader cultural trends. This paper makes three primary contributions: 1) mapping local wildfire values at the national scale; 2) understanding tensions in environmental governance in a multilevel federalist system; and 3) advancing values as an important metric for plan quality evaluation.