Wildfires in the West are becoming inevitable, and communities that rethink what it means to live with them will likely fare better than those that simply rebuild after they burn.
So says a recently published paper led by Dave McWethy, assistant professor of Earth Sciences in Montana State University’s College of Letters and Science, and a group of scientists from several other institutions across the U.S. and Canada.
The paper, published in the journal Nature Sustainability on August 19, argues that communities should consider how to adapt and, in some cases, transform themselves to be more resilient to the inevitability of wildfires in the future and provides examples of communities that have successfully done so in recent years.
“The key point of our paper is that current approaches to responding to wildfire are not working, especially as fire seasons are getting warmer and longer,” McWethy said. “In many fire-susceptible landscapes, rebuilding after wildfire leaves communities in a constant state of vulnerability.”
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