Wildfire and a Whole-of-Society Approach
Excerpt from POLIS Wildfire Resilience Project – Lightning Explainer Series
By: Oliver M. Brandes with Andrea Barnett, Doug Donaldson, and Kevin Kriese
Even though fire is a natural and necessary process on the landscape, the impacts of today’s often catastrophic wildfires on communities and ecosystems are significant and projected to increase in the coming years. This escalating situation requires additional resources, efforts, and expertise to both mitigate and adapt to the negative impacts of wildfire on community safety, watershed security, and ecosystem health.
Wildfire frequency, intensity, and scale will increase as the climate continues to warm. The increasing scale and challenge of the wildfire crisis requires a response of similar magnitude. We need robust action both within and beyond the provincial government.
Some response is already underway, but much more is required. (1)
A whole-of-society approach integrates and coordinates efforts within and beyond the provincial government (see Figure 1). It necessarily includes other levels and orders of government (Indigenous, local, and federal) and more deeply involves critical non-government actors, such as industry and business, civil society, practitioners and local experts, professional associations, non-government organizations, and citizens and communities — all of whom bring new and unique resources, knowledge.
In our view, the provincial government — as a leader and enabler of decisions and actions — is a crucial catalyst for unlocking this new more cooperative and collaborative approach at a variety of scales.
A whole-of-society approach creates new pathways that move beyond the historical top-down, “command-and-control” approach to wildfire management. It reveals new possibilities for partnerships, action, and accountability and creates conditions for working effectively at the intersection of numerous pressing issues and fundamental values within society. These include climate change adaptation, reconciliation, conservation priorities, the economy, community quality of life, and mental and physical health. The scale and scope of the wildfire crisis, along with the ecological, cultural, and community complexity and diversity of British Columbia, means that planning and actions will need to be distributed, largely decentralized, and place based yet effectively coordinated.
A critical starting point for advancing a whole-of-society approach is identifying the various roles and responsibilities of Indigenous governments and integrating the inherent capacity of communities at large into local action and decision-making, especially in the context of watershed and landscape-level planning and wildfire resilience.
The following table offers a snapshot of how a whole-of-society approach might work, how it shifts the fundamental understanding around roles and responsibilities, and how working more collaboratively can leverage more capacity and capability, and increase wildfire resilience in B.C.
POLIS’ Lightning Explainer series explores critical and emerging issues and topics concerning wildfire resilience. The first installment explores the need for a whole-of-society approach that integrates and coordinates efforts within and beyond the provincial government. The authors describe how to unlock this cooperative and collaborative approach at a variety of scales and the shifts required to effectively increase wildfire resilience in B.C.