Wildfire imagery reduces risk information-seeking among homeowners as property wildfire risk increases.

Negative imagery of destruction may induce or inhibit action to reduce risks from climate-exacerbated hazards, such as wildfires. This has generated conflicting assumptions among experts who communicate with homeowners: half of surveyed wildfire practitioners perceive a lack of expert agreement about the effect of negative imagery (a burning house) on homeowner behavior, yet most believe negative imagery is more engaging. We tested whether this expectation matched homeowner response in the United States. In an online experiment, homeowners who viewed negative imagery reported more negative emotions but the same behavioral intentions compared to those who viewed status-quo landscape photos. In a pre-registered field experiment, homeowners who received a postcard showing negative imagery were equally likely, overall, to visit a wildfire risk webpage as those whose postcard showed a status quo photo. However, the negative imagery decreased webpage visits as homeowners' wildfire risk increased. These results illustrate the importance of testing assumptions to encourage behavioral adaptation to climate change.

Do actions reduce perceived risk? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between risk perception and actions in response to forest disturbance in Colorado.

As residents living in hazard-prone areas face on-going environmental threats, the actions they take to mitigate such risks are likely motivated by various factors. Whereas risk perception has been considered a key determinant of related behavioral responses, little is known about how risk mitigation actions influence subsequent perceived risk. In other words, do actions to prevent or mitigate risk reduce risk perception? This longitudinal study considers the dynamic relationships between risk perception and risk-mitigating behavior in the context of forest disturbance in north-central Colorado. Based on panel survey data collected in 2007 and 2018, the results provide a first look at changes in perceived forest risks as they relate to individual and community actions in response to an extensive mountain pine beetle outbreak. Analysis revealed that the perception of direct forest risks (forest fire and falling trees) increased, whereas indirect forest risk perception (concern on broader threats to local community) decreased across the two study phases. Higher individual or community activeness (level of actions) was associated with subsequent reductions in perceived forest fire risk, smaller increases in direct risk perception, and larger decreases in indirect risk perception. These findings contribute insights into the complex risk reappraisal process in forest hazard contexts, with direct implications for risk communication and management strategies.

You vs. us: framing adaptation behavior in terms of private or social benefits.

Private actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change may have benefits to both the individual and society. In some cases, an individual may be motivated by appeals that highlight benefits to others, rather than to oneself. We test whether such prosocial framing influences information-seeking behavior to address wildfire risk among homeowners. In a field experiment across ten communities in western Colorado, property owners (n = 2977) received a postcard from their local fire department highlighting the impact of risk mitigation to either "your property" (private benefits) or "our community" (social benefits). The postcard directed recipients to visit a personalized webpage on wildfire risk. Overall, 10.5% of property owners visited their personalized risk webpage. There was little difference in webpage visitation between those who received the social (11.3%) rather than the private (9.7%) benefits message (χ 2 = 1.74, p = 0.19). However, response may depend on a property owner's relationship to the community. Those who reside within the community (as opposed to out-of-town owners) or who were in an evacuation zone during a recent wildfire were more likely to visit their webpages after receiving the social benefits message. How homeowners view their contributions to shared risk and whether simple changes in messaging influence prosocial behavior can inform efforts to address climate-exacerbated hazards. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-022-03400-4.

Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes.

Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland-urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. Although many plants, animals, and ecosystem services benefit from fire, it is unknown how ecosystems will respond to increased burning and warming. Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed. Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire. These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildland-urban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire.

Is Seeing Believing? Perceptions of Wildfire Risk Over Time.

Ongoing challenges to understanding how hazard exposure and disaster experiences influence perceived risk lead us to ask: Is seeing believing? We approach risk perception by attending to two components of overall risk perception: perceived probability of an event occurring and perceived consequences if an event occurs. Using a two-period longitudinal data set collected from a survey of homeowners living in a fire-prone area of Colorado, we find that study participants' initial high levels of perceived probability and consequences of a wildfire did not change substantially after extreme wildfire events in the intervening years. More specifically, perceived probability of a wildfire changed very little, whereas the perceived consequences of a wildfire went up a bit. In addition, models of risk perceptions show that the two components of overall risk perception are correlated with somewhat different factors, and experience is not found to be one of the strongest correlates with perceived risk. These results reflect the importance of distinguishing the components of overall risk and modeling them separately to facilitate additional insights into the complexities of risk perceptions, factors related to perceived risk, and change in risk perceptions over time.

Understanding Gaps Between the Risk Perceptions of Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Residents and Wildfire Professionals.

Research across a variety of risk domains finds that the risk perceptions of professionals and the public differ. Such risk perception gaps occur if professionals and the public understand individual risk factors differently or if they aggregate risk factors into overall risk differently. The nature of such divergences, whether based on objective inaccuracies or on differing perspectives, is important to understand. However, evidence of risk perception gaps typically pertains to general, overall risk levels; evidence of and details about mismatches between the specific level of risk faced by individuals and their perceptions of that risk is less available. We examine these issues with a paired data set of professional and resident assessments of parcel-level wildfire risk for private property in a wildland-urban interface community located in western Colorado, United States. We find evidence of a gap between the parcel-level risk assessments of a wildfire professional and numerous measures of residents' risk assessments. Overall risk ratings diverge for the majority of properties, as do judgments about many specific property attributes and about the relative contribution of these attributes to a property's overall level of risk. However, overall risk gaps are not well explained by many factors commonly found to relate to risk perceptions. Understanding the nature of these risk perception gaps can facilitate improved communication by wildfire professionals about how risks can be mitigated on private lands. These results also speak to the general nature of individual-level risk perception.

Wildfire-Migration Dynamics: Lessons from Colorado's Fourmile Canyon Fire.

The number of people living in wildfire prone wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities is on the rise. Yet, no prior study has investigated wildfire-induced residential relocation from WUI areas after a major fire event. To provide insight into the association between socio-demographic and socio-psychological characteristics and wildfire related intention to move, we use data from a survey of WUI residents in Boulder and Larimer Counties, Colorado. The data were collected two months after the devastating Fourmile Canyon fire destroyed 169 homes and burned over 6,000 acres of public and private land. Although working with a small migrant sample, logistic regression models demonstrate that survey respondents intending to move in relation to wildfire incidence do not differ socio-demographically from their non-migrant counterparts. They do, however, show significantly higher levels of risk perception. Investigating destination choices shows a preference for short distance moves.

Social amplification of wildfire risk: the role of social interactions and information sources.

Wildfire is a persistent and growing threat across much of the western United States. Understanding how people living in fire-prone areas perceive this threat is essential to the design of effective risk management policies. Drawing on the social amplification of risk framework, we develop a conceptual model of wildfire risk perceptions that incorporates the social processes that likely shape how individuals in fire-prone areas come to understand this risk, highlighting the role of information sources and social interactions. We classify information sources as expert or nonexpert, and group social interactions according to two dimensions: formal versus informal, and generic versus fire-specific. Using survey data from two Colorado counties, we empirically examine how information sources and social interactions relate to the perceived probability and perceived consequences of a wildfire. Our results suggest that social amplification processes play a role in shaping how individuals in this area perceive wildfire risk. A key finding is that both "vertical" (i.e., expert information sources and formal social interactions) and "horizontal" (i.e., nonexpert information and informal interactions) interactions are associated with perceived risk of experiencing a wildfire. We also find evidence of perceived "risk interdependency"--that is, homeowners' perceptions of risk are higher when vegetation on neighboring properties is perceived to be dense. Incorporating social amplification processes into community-based wildfire education programs and evaluating these programs' effectiveness constitutes an area for future inquiry.

Trying not to get burned: understanding homeowners' wildfire risk-mitigation behaviors.

Three causes have been identified for the spiraling cost of wildfire suppression in the United States: climate change, fuel accumulation from past wildfire suppression, and development in fire-prone areas. Because little is likely to be performed to halt the effects of climate on wildfire risk, and because fuel-management budgets cannot keep pace with fuel accumulation let alone reverse it, changing the behaviors of existing and potential homeowners in fire-prone areas is the most promising approach to decreasing the cost of suppressing wildfires in the wildland-urban interface and increasing the odds of homes surviving wildfire events. Wildfire education efforts encourage homeowners to manage their property to decrease wildfire risk. Such programs may be more effective with a better understanding of the factors related to homeowners' decisions to undertake wildfire risk-reduction actions. In this study, we measured whether homeowners had implemented 12 wildfire risk-mitigation measures in 2 Colorado Front Range counties. We found that wildfire information received from local volunteer fire departments and county wildfire specialists, as well as talking with neighbors about wildfire, were positively associated with higher levels of mitigation. Firsthand experience in the form of preparing for or undertaking an evacuation was also associated with a higher level of mitigation. Finally, homeowners who perceived higher levels of wildfire risk on their property had undertaken higher levels of wildfire-risk mitigation on their property.