Sponsor
This work was supported by the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station through Joint Venture Agreement 20-JV-11221637-062. Additional support was provided by The Ohio State University, College of Food Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, and the US National Science Foundation Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Program (#2018152).
Published In
Regional Environmental Change
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2024
Subjects
Wildfires -- research, Wildfire risk -- United States
Abstract
Theory predicts that effective environmental governance requires that the scales of management account for the scales of environmental processes. A good example is community wildfire protection planning. Plan boundaries that are too narrowly defined may miss sources of wildfire risk originating at larger geographic scales whereas boundaries that are too broadly defined dilute resources. Although the concept of scale (mis)matches is widely discussed in literature on risk mitigation as well as environmental governance more generally, rarely has the concept been rigorously quantified. We introduce methods to address this limitation, and we apply our approach to assess scale matching among Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) in the western US. Our approach compares two metrics: (1) the proportion of risk sources encompassed by planning jurisdictions (sensitivity) and (2) the proportion of area in planning jurisdictions in which risk can originate (precision). Using data from 852 CWPPs and a published library of 54 million simulated wildfires, we demonstrate a trade-off between sensitivity and precision. Our analysis reveals that spatial scale match—the product of sensitivity and precision—has an n-shaped relationship with jurisdiction size and is maximal at approximately 500 km2. Bayesian multilevel models further suggest that functional scale match—via neighboring, nested, and overlapping planning jurisdictions—may compensate for low sensitivity. This study provides a rare instance of a quantitative framework to measure scale match in environmental planning and has broad implications for risk mitigation as well as in other environmental governance settings.
Rights
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1007/s10113-024-02239-y
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42011
Citation Details
Hamilton, M., Evers, C., Nielsen-Pincus, M., & Ager, A. (2024). Matching the scales of planning and environmental risk: an evaluation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans in the western US. Regional Environmental Change, 24(2).