[MCN] Fuels management inadequate, defense of wildland-urban interfaceunsustainable

[Lance Olsen]

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - April 17 2017.  
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1617464114
Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes
Tania Schoennagel <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Tania+Schoennagel&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>  et al
Abstract [bold emphasis added}
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/04/11/1617464114.abstract <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/04/11/1617464114.abstract>

Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland–urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. Although many plants, animals, and ecosystem services benefit from fire, it is unknown how ecosystems will respond to increased burning and warming. Policy and management have focused primarily on specified resilience approaches aimed at resistance to wildfire and restoration of areas burned by wildfire through fire suppression and fuels management. These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires. In contrast, policies that promote adaptive resilience to wildfire, by which people and ecosystems adjust and reorganize in response to changing fire regimes to reduce future vulnerability, are needed. Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire. These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildland–urban interface to developing fire-adapted communities. We propose an approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire.
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"… the race between climate dynamics and  climate policy will be a close one ….” and 
“ … requires an industrial revolution for sustainability starting now."

Hans Joachim Schellenhuber.“Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking?”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. September 23, 2008
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“Human society has yet to appreciate the implications of unprecedented species redistribution for life on Earth, 
including for human lives. Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, the responses required in human 
systems to adapt to the most serious effects of climate-driven species redistribution would be massive.”
 
Pecl et al. 2017. Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being
Science. 31 March 2017

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