A team of experts and researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed an index that tracks and scores communities on their wildfire resilience.
Dr. Cat Fong, a researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UCSB, is the co-lead on the Wildfire Resilience Index.
“Wildfire is a wicked problem,” Fong told KCBX. “Everyone who lives in a fire-prone area, which is most of us in California, has a goal of building resilience. But what that means isn't always clear.”
The index divides the concept of resilience into two parts: resistance and recovery.
Fong describes recovery as an ability to bounce back after a fire, and resistance as preventative measures like, for example, taking steps to make a habitat more resistant to damage.
“So thinning, prescribed fire, things like that can make the habitat more resilient to catastrophic loss should a wildfire come through,” Fong said. “ Things like restoration activities or assisted reforestation can help on the recovery side.”
The free, online tool that Fong helped build covers most of the Western U.S. and British Columbia.
The Wildfire Resilience Index allows users to look up a community’s overall score, but also provides subscores in multiple categories, including infrastructure, livelihoods, habitats and air quality.
On overall resilience, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties both scored 76%. SLO County’s lowest category score was infrastructure, at 67%, and Santa Barbara’s was in water, at 66%.
Fong says in categories like infrastructure, communities and livelihoods, most places had a higher recovery score than a resistance score.
She also noticed another strong trend.
“ We found on the social and economic side of things, the places that had the highest resilience were the places that were wealthy,” Fong said.
Fong says her team hopes to update the tool every year, so as improvements are made, communities can see their scores increase.
