2 wildfire

A CALL TO ACTION

RETHINKING STRATEGY IN WILDFIRE RESPONSE

BY BRAD PIETRUSZKA, DAVE CALKIN, MATT THOMPSON, AND STEPHEN FILLMORE

Expected future scenarios including climate change, a greater incidence of urban conflagrations, and continued fuel-load accumulations will increase demands on the wildfire management system in the United States, resulting in increased difficulty managing wildfires. There is a need to expand concepts of effectiveness to manage more extreme and complex events.

Fires nominally managed under the same defined strategy (for example, full suppression) can have widely divergent resource needs, tactics, and timeframes. The increase in hazards during wildfire operations is leading to shifts in how fires are engaged, even when rapid containment is the most desired objective. The need to improve systems of understanding, developing, and communicating wildfire strategies is a key source of leverage to mitigate the consequences of increasing workload and complexity on a system under duress.

Ensuring sound strategy is essential as wildfire response systems continue to be tested by these pressures. However, these issues, as well as many unforeseen, will challenge our ability to effectively convey the rationale behind a chosen strategy, connect it to outcomes, and learn from it.

The current understanding and approach for developing and communicating wildfire response strategy is insufficient to meet these challenges.

Arguably, some of these issues are systemic and originate at least in part from the current framing of the problem, in which the wildfire itself is the problem.

There is an urgent need to convene greater dialog within the fire management community around the idea and application of strategy. Given the recent evolutions in strategic guidance, now is an opportune time. The USDA Forest Service issued a Wildfire Crisis Strategy in early 2022 that emphasizes returning fire to fire-prone forests. The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy was updated in 2023 with an addendum that also identifies a need to increase the use of proactive fire. The US Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commissioner’s final report similarly echoes these aims. The wildland fire community has a unique window of opportunity to capitalize on the convergence and momentum of these calls for change.

WHAT IS STRATEGY?

The concept of strategy is often misunderstood and misapplied; improvement of the core concept is critical to improvement. The US Marine Corps War College Strategy states that “In its simplest form, strategy is a theory on how to achieve a stated goal.” Within the world of wildland fire, we can and do learn from military strategic victories and defeats, yet the framing of these lessons is around the outcome of the battle, with less attention paid to the uncertainties faced and trade-offs made by commanders. There are valuable lessons in understanding key tenets of applied military strategy, yet wildland fire practitioners must reckon with the fact that war with fire, as viewed in the traditional sense, is inherently un-winnable. Fire and land managers must begin to think about wildland fire differently to make progress against the threats it poses.

Other fields, such as business management, have similar views of strategy, but framed with alternative lenses and complementary insights. In a 1996 article What is Strategy, Michael Porter describes the essence of strategy as making trade-offs, choosing what not to do, and deploying a system of combined, aligned activities. In the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt says strategy requires diagnosing the challenge to be overcome, providing guiding policies, and identifying a set of coherent actions; doing this frames the addressable challenges to be surmounted and then establishes overall direction and guardrails to implement actions. Both authors suggest that strategy is about problem solving through creativity, design, and iteration. Importantly, by first understanding the problem and framing it correctly, objectives become not about predefined inputs into a decision process, but about meaningfully measuring progress towards achieving the strategy.

In other words, objectives emerge from the process of strategy setting – they shouldn’t pre-empt it. Objectives are unsupported if they come before critical analysis of a challenge. While goals should guide the direction organizations take, objectives should measure progress toward achieving strategies that overcome specific problems. In sum, strategy setting is about problem framing, focus, co-ordination, and tailoring solutions to specific problems or opportunity – and there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

INCIDENT STRATEGIES FOR WILDFIRE

The Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) reporting system provides four incident strategy options from which fire managers can choose. Through our research and professional observations, we believe that none of the four options provides a holistic representation of a strategy on their own, or in combination. Also, simply reporting portions of each option does not solve this. The current definitions of each ICS-209 strategy option are shown on page 28.

There is an urgent need to for more dialog within the fire management community around the idea and application of strategy for wildland fire management, according to the authors. Photo by Ari Lightsey.

FULL SUPPRESSION

“. . . put the fire out as efficiently and effectively as possible while providing for firefighter and public safety. This includes completing a fireline around a fire to halt fire spread, and cooling all hot spots that are immediate threats to control lines or outside the perimeter, until the lines can reasonably be expected to hold under foreseeable conditions.” Full suppression is synonymous with “full perimeter containment” and “control.”

POINT / ZONE PROTECTION

… protects specific assets or highly valued resources from the wildfire without directly halting the continued spread of the wildfire.

CONFINE

…restricting a wildfire to a defined area, primarily using natural barriers that are expected to restrict the spread of the wildfire under the prevailing and forecasted weather conditions. Some response action may be required to augment or connect natural barriers (e.g., line construction, burn-out, bucket drops, etc.).

MONITOR

. . . the orderly collection, analysis, and interpretation of environmental data to evaluate management’s progress toward meeting objectives and to identify changes in natural systems particularly with regards to fuels, topography, weather, fire behavior, fire effects, smoke, and fire location.

Full suppression appears to be applied most often when a fire is considered an acute problem, solvable only by making the fire go away rapidly. Agency employees and the public can take the view that using any other listed strategy indicates a desire or willingness to allow fires to burn unabated. However, the only strategy that places a values-based judgement on a fire is full suppression, as it identifies the fire itself as the challenge to be overcome and uses an inapplicable problem frame. Confusion also arises because the definition of full suppression does not dictate where, when, or in what fashion a fireline must be completed around the fire. Nor does the 2009 Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy indicate when, where or how a fire should be suppressed when the full-suppression strategy is chosen. In fact, managers may implement a variety of tactics to achieve full suppression. Indirect control lines located miles from the final perimeter are commonly used during full-suppression fires, yet the reasons underlying these decisions are not always well conveyed internally or externally, leaving communication gaps for the rationale behind fire-management decisions.

Complicating the matter, some fires that achieved resource objectives (such as improving wildlife habitat or watershed functionality) may have appeared to the public to have been intensively managed, particularly if fire crews spent numerous days completing firing operations – identical in appearance to indirect tactics that achieve full suppression. Or, as research has shown, other fires that are described to the public as full suppression may not see a firefighter directly engage with the fire at all. Given how different managerial intent can translate into nearly identical implementation actions, we believe it is time to revisit not only how wildfire strategy is reported but also how it is communicated.

As discussed, framing the problem is critical to developing strategy. A strategy built to simply eliminate a fire from existing is a poor one – just as a strategy built to simply allow fire to burn unabated would be. The perceptions of good or bad placed upon fires are social-based moral judgements that differ among individuals; this creates an impossible perspective from which to develop and apply sound strategies. The way people feel about any wildfire is irrelevant; the fire itself does not share any of those concerns – it simply exists, creating risks that must be addressed.

ROADMAP FOR IMPROVEMENT

More than a century of fighting wildfire in the United States has created an acknowledged fire paradox; past wins (successful suppression) have significantly contributed to current losses (the wildfire crisis). Viewing fire as the enemy to overcome continues an unsustainable cycle of fire exclusion, resulting in increasing costs and losses. Reframing the understanding and communication of the problem may improve outcomes. We propose the following definition of wildfire strategy: the focused set of actions taken to address incident level challenges, guided by seeking the best balance of risk to lives, communities, and landscapes.

We offer several ideas for improving strategy. First, we believe a big part of the solution is a fundamental shift in how the wildfire problem is framed. Describing specific challenges presented by a fire that need to be overcome, and why, could improve communication, versus describing only actions unlinked from the meaning behind them. Specific and clear language is necessary to communicate the risks to values and firefighters, and the trade-offs that managers must make to limit those risks as fully as practicable.

Developing strategies framed around specific addressable challenges has had some success in the United States with the evolution of the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP). ISAP is a continuation of previous risk management efforts, such as the 2016 USDA Forest Service’s Life First Initiative, which led to the advent of Risk Management Assistance Teams from 2017 to 2019. ISAP provides a framework through which agency administrators and incident management teams can anchor strategic conversations to a set of four pillars: critical values at risk; strategic actions; responder risk; and probability of success. This framework allows managers to have risk-informed dialog with key partners, stakeholders, and Indigenous leaders while developing strategies that leverage analytics and data in addition to experience and judgement. Discussing risks to lives, communities, and landscapes instead of debating and reporting categorizations such as full suppression or monitor, may improve the basis upon which strategy is built, communicated, and applied.

WE PROPOSE THE FOLLOWING DEFINITION: WILDFIRE STRATEGY IS THE FOCUSED SET OF ACTIONS TAKEN TO ADDRESS INCIDENT LEVEL CHALLENGES, GUIDED BY SEEKING THE BEST BALANCE OF RISK TO LIVES, COMMUNITIES, AND LANDSCAPES.

More than a century of fighting wildfire in the United States has created a fire paradox; past wins (successful suppression) have significantly contributed to current losses (the wildfire crisis). Photo by Ari Lightsey.

ISAP leverages several spatial risk-management products, collectively referred to as risk management assistance products. Tools such as potential operational delineations or PODs, suppression difficulty index or SDI, potential control locations or PCL, snag hazard, and other layers are available pre-season and CONUS wide. Continued investment in these types of decision-support tools is critical to improve strategies, while understanding that experts and novices use information differently, and that improving data quality alone does not improve decision quality. There must be simultaneous investment in the tools while training the workforce to use them.

Second, there is room to improve assessments and understanding of probability of success. How likely is a strategy to succeed, and are the potential benefits of a decision meaningful enough to act upon? These two questions comprise a critical element of any strategy and should inform any deliberation of whether the risk is warranted, as no action undertaken is guaranteed to be successful.

Recent research on fireline effectiveness shows that on large fires in the United States, only about one in three miles (33 per cent) of constructed fireline ends up containing fire spread. According to Paul Slovic and others in 1985, “. . . intelligent people have great difficulty judging probabilities . . . ”. Decision makers must consider both facts in attempts to improve strategy. The mismatch between assessed and observed outcomes can, in part, be explained by the overconfidence effect, but it is feasible and critically important to assign a reasonable estimation of the probability of success to make decisions based on the expected value of the outcome.

However, a low probability of success on its own does not mean an action should be dismissed. An action with a low probability of success may be justified if the payoff is very high and risks to responders can be mitigated to an acceptable level. Conversely, an action that may be very likely to succeed yet results in very little benefit must be subjected to scrutiny. As evidenced from the United States’ initial attack success rate of 98 per cent, the undertaking of high probability of success actions on a large scale (initial response focused on minimizing fire size) has resulted in the remaining two per cent of ignitions burning in unbroken fuelbeds that are more prone to high severity and rapidly spreading wildfire. Linking the assessment of uncertainty to the expected result of the action is critical to improving decision making and strategy development.

Third, senior leaders could provide guiding policies that include clear articulation of their risk appetite and risk tolerance. Specifically, leaders could move away from qualitative assessments that define risks as low or high, and move toward quantitative descriptions of risk. These descriptions should be aligned in terms of severity, followed by a determination of the tolerability of each to understand and communicate enterprise risks. Indeed, including sociopolitical, economic, and career risks must be considered in this exercise. Only after completing this process can individual wildfire strategic decisions align with organizational risks. Absent clarity on enterprise-level risks, the system will continue to be noisy, and we will continue to fall back on institutional biases such as the default to aggressive wildfire suppression.

Recent research on fireline effectiveness shows that on large fires in the United States, only about 33 per cent of constructed fireline ends up containing fire spread. Photo by Ari Lightsey.

A revised wildland fire managemetn strategy would include senior leaders providing guiding policies that include clear articulation of their risk appetite and risk tolerance. Photo by Ari Lightsey.

Fourth, we believe there is an opportunity for wildfire management in the United States to undertake a systematic decision audit, reviewing and daylighting examples of acceptable risk trade-offs even when bad outcomes occurred, and finding acceptable outcomes as the result of unnecessary and unsustainable risk taking. Individually, we must hold ourselves accountable, but organizations must also be held accountable, set clear expectations and provide appropriate methods to consider trade-offs among competing priorities and their conditions for success.

Fifth, the need to establish consistent time horizons for assessing risks that get wildfire response out of the short-term emergency response mindset and working toward a long-term stewardship mindset could help foster improvement. Failing to do so will enlarge the burden on an already strained wildfire response system. The tendency of people to accept lower benefit in the short-term despite their future selves regretting that decision is called hyperbolic discounting and is one of the key contributors to the wildfire crisis. To move beyond this bias, incident strategies must be developed with both short- and long-term impacts in mind. To be clear – we are not advocating to dismiss short-term threats but if incident strategies are limited only to a small temporal horizon, long-term outcomes will continue to suffer. Importantly, a longer-term focus may improve communicating short-term disruptions such as smoke impacts from either prescribed or wildfires in terms of future risk reduction.

Finally, we the wildfire response system need to embrace a learning culture, which likely means initiating a broader dialog that changes the understanding of strategy, its implementation, and its implications. Truly embracing a learning culture also means allowing the application of military lessons of strategy yet fundamentally reframing and moving from the war on fire to living with fire. Changing this paradigm will certainly mean measuring performance and modifying behaviors when gaps are identified. Organizationally, we must span boundaries, from fire managers to agency administrators certainly, but also bridge the gap between scientists and implementers. No group in the wildland fire system fully understands the others, yet all are dependent on one another to improve. The entire system must recognize that our collective history got us into this paradox and that doubling down on the status quo is not going to lead to changes that are long past due. If you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.

Societal expectations drive managerial incentives, and status quo is usually safer professionally than trying something different. Anyone who becomes a wildfire decision maker must understand how difficult their choices will be, and how often they will face criticism because of them, regardless of the choice’s quality. Communicating strategy, particularly the feasibility of that strategy, both at the near- term (incident level) and longer term (landscape condition) will be critical to this work. What you are doing and why, as well as what you are not doing and why, would describe a chosen strategy in more definitive terms than the current approach. At its core, the question becomes how do we best reduce risk and complexity – not only for an individual fire, but for coming years and decades. In other words, how can this be done durably and systematically?

While certainly not the only answer, we believe that part of the answer is a better understanding and execution of strategy.

The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. government determination or policy. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.

This material was prepared by federal government employees as part of their official duties and therefore is in the public domain and can be reproduced at will. Inclusion in a private publication that is itself copyrighted does not nullify the public domain designation of this material.