Last September, the congressionally mandated Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission submitted its final report to federal legislators. The commissioners – made up of a diverse group of dozens of researchers, public officials, land managers, tribal representatives and others – came to consensus on nearly 150 recommendations to improve the federal response to the wildfire crisis.
Recently, the Western Governors’ Association urged Congress to take action on a number of those recommendations. They include the creation of a community wildfire risk reduction program, which – as laid out in the commission’s report – would support wildfire resilience research, the local adoption of fire-safe building codes, incentives for home hardening and a number of other measures.
The governors’ interest in addressing the safety of homes and other structures was heartening to Kimiko Barrett, a former commission member with Headwaters Economics who studies wildfire resilience.
“I think shedding light on the need to address the built environment mutually and complementary to the natural environment is significant in terms of what the commission report came to consensus on,” she said. “And it seems like the Western Governors’ Association recognition of this is pretty formative in changing how we manage, mitigate and reduce risk to wildfires here in the West and across the country.”
Barrett has recently written about the comparatively meager attention paid to the built environment relative to efforts like prescribed fire and other fuels reduction measures.
The governors expressed support for significantly “increasing the pace and scale” of such measures, as well as growing training opportunities and reducing regulatory hurdles to carry them out. Improvements in post-fire recovery were also highlighted by the state leaders, as was “increased investment in and training for a federal land management workforce that is skilled in mitigation and restoration activities,” their letter to congressional leaders reads.
You can read the full document here.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
