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The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using wildfire mitigation strategies to proactively reduce the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests. In the US, the federal government recently pledged billions of US dollars through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act to expand the use of forest thinning and prescribed fire. It is a historic “down payment” with an aspirational goal of treating at least 60 million acres in the next 10 years. If the US invests this “down payment” strategically, these investments should reduce subsequent wildfire severity and protect values that Americans care about – including keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and stored in healthy forests. However, knowing where to prioritize these investments is not straightforward, given the size of the US. Using the spatial frameworks of firesheds and potential operational delineations (PODs), this talk highlights a multi-scale approach for prioritizing where investments could reduce the greatest risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss. Importantly, the approach can be adopted for other goals and values such as protecting communities or municipal water supplies, with potential for identifying co-benefits that offer win-win scenarios for wildfire mitigation.