WWETAC Projects

Project Title: Literature synthesis of potential components of an adaptive capacity self-assessment tool for WUI communities

JFSP ID: 10-3-01-7

Principal Investigator: Matthew Carroll, Washington State University, Pullman, WA

Cooperator: Paige Fischer, Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Prineville, OR

Status: Ongoing

E-mail Contact: Matthew Carroll, carroll[at]wsu.edu; Paige Fischer, paigefischer[at]fs.fed.us

Summary: Human communities in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), areas where housing mixes with undeveloped wildlands, face a variety of specific challenges ranging from a loss of economic base to drought, fire and forest health issues in the areas around them. Most of these challenges relate directly or indirectly to their relationship to the forests and wildland settings in which they are located. In this project we attempt to synthesize what is known in the literature about how the capacity of human communities in the WUI to adapt may be assessed both by communities themselves and by other government entities which may use such information to assist WUI communities in becoming more adaptive to social economic and environmental change. This important step will ultimately assist in the creation and testing of a broadly applicable assessment tool which can be employed across the WUI as part of an effort to improve community resilience. fire and wui

General Description: The purpose of this agreement is to review and synthesize relevant literature concerning assessment tools used to help human communities better adapt to environmental social and economic perturbations in an era of global and environmental change and uncertainty. Communities in the Wildland Urban Interface face a variety of specific challenges ranging from a loss of economic base to drought, fire and forest health issues in the areas around them. Most of these challenges relate directly or indirectly to their relationship to the forests and wildland settings in which they are located. What we propose here is a critical step in the direction of developing an assessment tool that will allow actors at various levels of government to assess the needs of individual communities as they face the need to adapt in the face of such changes. This effort is premised on the notion of adaptive capacity as a key ingredient in this process.  

Adaptive capacity is a concept that has been adopted by a number of disciplines in relation to the resilience of human communities (Cutter et al 2008; Norris et al 2008). For instance, studies from political ecology, environmental justice and global climate change conceive of adaptive capacity as an important facet of resilience to change (including hazards). Adaptive capacity is often treated as the ability or preconditions of a system to adjust to change through a process of learning (Nelson et al 2007). It is the driver of adaptation and subsequent impacts on vulnerability or resilience.  As such, scholars using this concept conceive of a resilient social system as one that is flexible, self organizing and existing at multiple states (Adger et al 2005; Gunderson 2009). Hazard literature, on the other hand, has more often used the term mitigation as a proxy of adaptive capacity, defining it as any action undertaken to avoid or reduce risk (Cutter et al 2008; Mileti 1999). Accordingly, a significant amount of hazard research defines resilience as the ability to absorb the minimum impact of a hazard and recover to a state of pre-event function, often with less emphasis on flexibility or constant adaptation of the system (Bruneau et al 2003; Tierney and Bruneau 2007).

Efforts to explicitly analyze or assess adaptive capacity in a given social system are still emerging (Adger et al 2005; Wall and Marzall 2006). However, the first step in understanding adaptation is the identification of vulnerability to change. This is because adaptation is, in effect, the reduction of vulnerability (Nelson et al 2007).   Although there have been a number of efforts to assess vulnerability and/or adaptation they have not fully accounted for the community as an agent of change in actively reducing their exposure (what we are calling adaptive capacity). Understanding and fostering such local action is one of the primary goals in Wilkinson’s community field theory (1991) and encompasses the notions of social capital often mentioned in other hazard frameworks (Adger 2003; Wisner et al 2004; Paton 2008). Unfortunately efforts to predict or measure the prevalence of such factors given the social context of an area are scarce.

Recent research demonstrates that some classic indicators of exposure to various risks and recovery from negative events (i.e. high wealth, density of built environment, race) do not apply in the same ways to populations at risk from a variety of change agents (Carroll et al 2006; Collins 2009). For instance, although it is estimated that 13 million wildland-urban interface residents “lack incomes sufficient to meet basic economic needs, much less the cost of adequate wildfire protection” (Lynn 2003, p. 10), a recent analysis of vulnerability to fire in the White Mountains of Arizona demonstrated that income and housing tenure only weakly correlate to vulnerability (Collins 2009). This analysis also found that long-term residents, full-time residents and those with forest-dependent jobs were less vulnerable to hazards and other changes, conclusions that contrast the notions inherent in many vulnerability assessments.

Goals and Objectives:

Review the existing literature on assessment tools concerning adaptation and resilience in natural resource based human communities.

Develop a manuscript that:

  •  Summarizes the key elements in this literature
  • Makes recommendations about the domains of content of a potential assessment tool for use in  WUI communities
  • Makes (at least preliminary) recommendations about  the methods by which such an assessment tool might be applied in a variety of WUI settings and how its results can be employed to improve adaptive capacity in such communities.

Background Citations:

Adger, W.N. 2003. Social capital, collective action and adaptation to climate change. Economic Geography 79(4):387-404.

Adger, W.N., N. Brooks, G. Bentham, M. Agnew and S. Ericksen. 2004. New indicators of vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Technical Report 7.

Adger, W.N., T. Hughes, C. Folke, S. Carpenter, J. Rockstrom. 2005. Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disaster. Science 309:1036-1039.

Bruneau, M., S. Chang, R. Eguchi, C. Lee, T. O’Rourke, A. Reinhorn, M. Shinozuka, K. Tierney, W. Wallace, and D. Winterfeldt. 2003. A Framework to Quantitatively Assess and Enhance the Seismic Resilience of Communities. Earthquake Spectra 19(4):733-752.

Carroll, M.S., P.A. Cohn, L.H. Higgins and J. Burchfield. 2006. Community Wildfire Events as a Source of Social Conflict. Rural Sociology 71(2):261-280.

Collins, T.W. 2009. Influences on wildfire hazard exposure in Arizona’s high country. Society and Natural Resources 22(3):211-229.

Cutter, S.L., L. Barnes, M. Berry, C. Burton, E. Evans, E. Tate, and J. Webb. 2008. A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters. Global Environmental Change 18:598-606.

Gunderson, L. 2010. Ecological and Human Community Resilience in Response to Natural Disasters. Ecology and Society 15(2):18.

Lynn, K. 2003. Wildfire and rural poverty: Disastrous connections. Natural Hazards Observer 29:10-11.

Mileti, D. S. 1999. Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States. Washington D.C.: Joseph Henry Press.

Nelson, D.R., W.N. Adger, and K. Brown. 2007. Adaption to Environmental Change: Contributions of a Resilience Framework. The Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32:395-419.

Norris, F., S. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, K. Wyche, and R. Pfefferbaum. 2008. Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. American Journal of Community Psychology 41:127–150.

Paton, D. 2008. Community resilience: Integrating individual, community and societal perspectives. In K. Gow and D. Paton (eds.) The Phoenix of Natural Disasters: Community Resilience. New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Tierney, K., and M. Bruneau. 2007. Conceptualizing and Measuring Resilience: A Key to Disaster Loss Reduction. TR News 250:14-17.

Wall, E., and K. Marzall. 2006. Adaptive Capacity for Climate Change in Canadian Rural Communities. Local Environment 11(4):373-397.

Wilkinson, K.P. 1991. The Community in Rural America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Wisner, B., P. Blaikie, T. Cannon, and I. Davis. 2004. At Risk: Natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disaster. (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

Project ID: FY10PF77