When Community Wildfire Adaptation Requires Transformation

Many research and policy initiatives seek to understand and foster adaptation to climate change at the community level. However, broader social and environmental systems often constrain community adaptation, such that, in some cases, systemic change is needed before communities can adapt. In the case of wildfire, a major climate change stressor in many parts of the world, hazardous conditions on the surrounding landscape constrain what communities can do to reduce risk. Some research suggests that large, destructive wildfires may create windows of opportunity for change. Responding to IBES TAC Chapter 3, we investigate how transformative adaptation occurs in the context of wildfire. Transformation adaptation refers to adaptation at large scales entailing behaviors that are new to a particular region or resource system and that transform places and shift locations (Kates et al. 2012). It is considered an appropriate response to novel shocks in the context of increasing loss, complexity, and uncertainty and rapid and high-magnitude change, signaling an impending regime shift (Colloff et al 2020). Through a cross-case comparison of the western US and south-central Chile, we investigate early signs of transformational adaptation and how it could reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire to communities. We investigate how community efforts to reduce risk are embedded within—and constrained by—social-ecological systems that create and exacerbate wildfire risk. We focus on situations where institutional forest management practices—enabled and encouraged by national economic policies—have created flammable forest conditions that pose an existential threat to communities and the ecosystem services on which they depend, and where communities—especially rural poor and indigenous peoples—are nevertheless expected to adapt. We identify cross-scale interactions and path dependencies that bring forest management, land use, wildfire risk, and community vulnerability into positive feedback loops. We propose leverage points for potential policy interventions to break these cycles following large wildfires. This research contributes to theories of transformation by integrating frameworks for understanding social-ecological systems, social vulnerability to natural hazards, and community adaptation.