Where wildfire risk and social vulnerability coincide: mapping place vulnerability to wildfire over the coterminous United States

Graduation date: 2015The hazards-of-place model of vulnerability to environmental hazards posits that vulnerability has biophysical and social components. While biophysical characteristics are important in predicting locations of elevated wildfire risk, the social characteristics of human communities may help us predict locations of elevated wildfire impacts. We examine the relationship between biophysical and social vulnerability to identify places that may experience impacts from wildfire hazards more acutely. We examine whether a singular focus on either biophysical or social vulnerability will accurately represent vulnerable places and predict that areas of high wildfire do not coincide with all areas of high social vulnerability. We develop a neighborhood-level social vulnerability index using principal component analysis and intersect it with an existing measure of wildfire risk to compare areas by place vulnerability to wildfire hazards. These results were mapped and further compared by wildland-urban interface categories. We find that few areas of high wildfire risk intersect with areas of high social vulnerability, but that stronger associations exist in some portions of the coterminous US. This analysis identifies regions and states with elevated levels of place vulnerability to wildfire\ud hazards, places that would have otherwise have been under identified in analyses that focused on either biophysical or social vulnerability alone. These results can help inform wildfire prevention, mitigation, and recovery planning processes, ultimately decreasing the hazards associated with wildfire for vulnerable places