Society is facing a wildfire crisis of ever-increasing risks to homes and communities in wildfire-prone areas. Current approaches to controlling wildfire are ineffective, costly, and inconsistent with the well-anchored notion that fire is a sustaining ecological factor in fire-adapted ecosystems. 

Community wildfire losses continue to rise due to several related factors: 1) communities have been and continue to be developed with vulnerable construction within and adjacent to fire-prone wildlands and with little preparation; 2) attempts at fire exclusion as a part of land management have caused fuel accumulation that threatens ecosystem sustainability in many areas; and 3) climate change is exacerbating wildfire activity. 

The U.S. government’s 2014 National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (Cohesive Strategy) is currently the dominant framework for addressing wildfire on the nation’s 640 million acres of federal land. The Strategy is an effort to work with public agencies and landowners to reduce wildfire risk on comingled lands. The broad approach of the Strategy outlines a vision of living with wildland fire by means of three primary goals: 1) engaging in safe and effective wildfire responses; 2) creating and maintaining resilient landscapes; and 3) creating and maintaining fire-adapted communities. In 2022 the U.S. Forest Service released its 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy. This Crisis Strategy outlines an ambitious goal of dramatically increasing the pace and scale of forest treatments “to address wildfire risks to critical infrastructure, protect communities, and make forests more resilient.” 

In 2023, an addendum to the Cohesive Strategy was approved that clearly recognized the inevitability that wildfire and communities will interact. Specifically, it restated the goal for fire-adapted communities as: “Human populations and infrastructure are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire.” While the Cohesive Strategy has greatly improved collaboration across the landscape and the more recent Wildfire Crisis Strategy outlines aggressive fuel treatment goals, government agencies responsible for carrying out wildfire and fuels management remain committed to the assumption that community protection should be a primary focus of federal wildfire mitigation and response efforts. Emphasizing fuel reduction on federal land proximate to communities as the cornerstone of both strategies fails to account for emerging research demonstrating that fires with high structure loss are increasingly ignited by human activity on nonfederal lands.1 Moreover, wildland-urban interface (WUI) research demonstrates that structure ignition conditions within communities principally determine destructive fire impacts on society. 

In this white paper, we assert that the current wildfire management approach has partially inverted the wildfire problem as one in which wildland fires encroach on communities when, in actuality, it is communities that Redefining the Urban Wildfire Problem in the West - 4 - Spring 2024 have increasingly impinged on wildlands where fires might appropriately play an important ecological role. As a result, predominant strategies continue to apply shortsighted, risk-averse reactions emphasizing community protection at the expense of creating resilient landscapes and promoting safe and effective wildfire responses.2 In doing so, managers are inadvertently limiting agency ability to build fire-adapted communities and generate landscape vegetation and fire conditions that support more meaningful and useful change. 

This paper highlights the uncompromising realities of nature and climate change and suggests practical opportunities for living within the conditions that can support ongoing wildland fire as an essential reality and vital ecological process. Wildfire is coming to our landscape. Is it fire that we can live with or fire that will repeatedly destroy us? Forward-looking ecological and practical thinking would transition conditions away from continually degrading fire-adapted ecosystems and underinvesting in community resilience and toward a sustainable approach that consistently promotes ecological and human ecosystem benefits.