Understanding Wildfire Impacts in California – Far More Than Acres Burned

How are wildfires impacting California, and how are those impacts evolving? This question is central to our social response to wildfire – including how we live with it, restore it to the landscape, and mitigate its worst effects. However, we do not yet have clear answers to this question. A wild variety of wildfire impacts are either not tracked or unreported, limiting our ability to make informed decisions in wildfire mitigation and recovery efforts. Furthermore, this truncated access to essential information and data has the potential to lead us to unsustainable solutions.

In an era of increasingly catastrophic wildland fires that raze human communities, a broader-based evaluation of these impacts is essential. A broader set of metrics also benefits evaluation and decision-making related to the critical need to restore functional fire to landscapes and build a greater understanding of the positive aspects of wildfire. This talk will discuss the California’s Year in Fire project, which advances a framework for a more complete picture of evolving impacts and consequences, and provides more robust data to inform meaningful solutions, with broad implications for policy and implementation.

Talk by Mr. Ken Alex, J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, and Ms. Leana Weissberg from UC Berkeley.