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1. Collective responsibility in wildfire mitigation: optimizing subsidies for enhancing community resilience

   https://doi.org/10.23967/icossar.2025.008  

   Wang, Zhujun; Lee, Ji Yun (January 2025, CIMNE)

   Wildfire poses an escalating threat to communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where both government efforts and homeowner actions are critical for risk reduction. While actions such as home hardening, defensible space creation, and vegetation management are recognized as effective, homeowner adoption rates remain suboptimal. This highlights the need to better understand the drivers of homeowner mitigation behavior, the dynamic interactions with neighbors, and strategies to incentivize broader participation. Existing research largely examines individual decision-making in isolation, often neglecting the interdependence among homeowners inherent in wildfire mitigation as a collective action problem. Moreover, the role of government subsidies in promoting mitigation actions remains underexplored. This study develops a utility-based model that captures homeowners’ mitigation decisions by incorporating income, homeownership tenure, wildfire risk, mitigation costs and benefits, and neighbor behaviors. Using Nash equilibrium analysis, we examine how homeowner strategies evolve under different levels of government subsidy and assess the collective utility outcomes for the community. Our results demonstrate the existence of a critical subsidy threshold necessary for wildfire mitigation to become the dominant homeowner strategy and highlight the importance of early-stage interventions and personal risk framing to overcome free-riding behavior and coordination failures. These results also underscore the importance of dynamic, targeted subsidy policies to foster collaborative mitigation efforts and strengthen WUI community resilience. 

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2. Evacuate or social distance? Modeling the influence of threat perceptions on hurricane evacuation in a dual‐threat environment

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14202  

   Wu, Hao‐Che; Murphy, Haley; Greer, Alex; Clay, Lauren (August 2023, Risk Analysis)

   Cox, L. Anthony (Ed.)

   This study investigates how different risk predictors influenced households’ evacuation decisions during a dual‐threat event (Hurricane Laura and COVID‐19 pandemic). The Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) literature indicates that perceived threat variables are the most influential variables that drive evacuation decisions. This study applies the PADM to investigate a dual‐threat disaster that has conflicting protective action recommendations. Given the novelty, scale, span, impact, and messaging around COVID‐19, it is crucial to see how hurricanes along the Gulf Coast—a hazard addressed seasonally by residents with mostly consistent protective action messaging—produce different reactions in residents in this pandemic context. Household survey data were collected during early 2021 using a disproportionate stratified sampling procedure to include households located in mandatory and voluntary evacuation areas across the coastal counties in Texas and parishes in Louisiana that were affected by Hurricane Laura. Structural equation modeling was used to identify the relationships between perceived threats and evacuation decisions. The findings suggest affective risk perceptions strongly affected cognitive risk perceptions (CRPs). Notably, hurricane and COVID‐19 CRPs are significant predictors of hurricane evacuation decisions in different ways. Hurricane CRPs encourage evacuation, but COVID‐19 CRPs hinder evacuation decisions. 

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3. From free-riding to collective action in wildfire mitigation: The role of policy incentives

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2026.132900  

   Wang, Zhu-Jun; Lee, Ji Yun (December 2026, Expert Systems with Applications)

   Homeowners' mitigation efforts are crucial for wildfire risk reduction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). However, participation in mitigation efforts remains limited, partly due to financial constraints and free-riding incentives. Existing studies often treat mitigation decisions in isolation, overlooking dynamic social interactions and potential policy interventions that might shape collective behavior. This study develops a game-theoretic model to investigate how cost sensitivity, homeownership tenure, and neighboring strategies influence homeowners’ wildfire mitigation decisions. Then, using a replicator dynamics framework, we further explore the conditions under which mitigation behavior either spread or collapse within a community, and how policy interventions can shift these dynamics toward greater collective action. Key findings include the following: (1) the analysis derives a critical subsidy threshold, beyond which collective mitigation becomes the socially optimal equilibrium; (2) early-stage seeding of mitigation behavior is essential to avoid convergence to inaction; and (3) policies that enhance perceived personal benefits are more effective than appeals to collective risk in promoting participation. These findings inform the design of behaviorally responsive subsidy policies to improve wildfire resilience in WUI areas. 

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4. Managed retreat: a nationwide study of the local, racially segmented resettlement of homeowners from rising flood risks

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acd654  

   Elliott, James R; Wang, Zheye (June 2023, Environmental Research Letters)

   Abstract The government-funded retreat of homeowners from flood-prone housing is a globally ascendant policy of climate adaptation. Yet, we still know relatively little about some fairly basic questions involving its participants: e.g. How much risk do homeowners tolerate before retreating? Where do they move? Does that move reduce their future flood risk? And, to what extent do answers to these questions vary by the type of racial and ethnic communities in which they live? To answer these questions, we combine novel address-to-address residential history data with future flood risk estimates and indices of local context to better understand how retreat is unfolding across the United States. Results indicate that, when voluntarily undertaken, retreat is a highly local process that yields notable reductions in household flood risk. These movements, however, are racially segmented, with homeowners in majority-White communities being more likely to stay in the face of higher risk and less likely to relocate to nearby areas that are not also majority-White. 

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5. Impact of Immersive Training on Senior Chemical Engineering Students' Prioritization of Process Safety Decision Criteria

   Stransky, J.; Hill, C.; Willets, J.; McErlean, R.; Bassett, L.; Anastasio, D.; Burkey, D.; Cooper, M.; Bodnar, C. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Conference)

   Every year new safety features and regulations are employed within the process industry to reduce risks associated with operations. Despite these advancements chemical plants remain hazardous places, and the role of the engineer will always involve risk mitigation through real time decision making. Results from a previous study by Kongsvik et al., 2015 indicated that there were three types of decisions in major chemical plants: strategic decisions, operational decisions, and instantaneous decisions. The study showed the importance for improving upon engineers’ operational and instantaneous choices when tasked with quick solutions in the workforce. In this research study, we dive deeper to understand how senior chemical engineering students’ prioritize components of decision making such as budget, productivity, relationships, safety, and time, and how this prioritization may change as a result of participation in a digital immersive training environment called Contents Under Pressure. More specifically, we seek to address the following two research questions: (1) How do senior chemical engineering students prioritize safety in comparison to criteria such as budget, personal relationships, plant productivity, and time in a process safety context, and (2) How does senior chemical engineering students’ prioritization of decision making criteria (budget, personal relationships, plant productivity, safety, and time) change after exposure to a virtual process safety decision making environment? As part of this study, 187 senior chemical engineering students from three separate institutions completed a pre- and post-reflection survey around their engagement with Contents Under Pressure and asked them to rank their prioritizations of budget, productivity, relationships, safety, and time. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Friedman and Wilcoxon-sign-rank post hoc analyses were completed to determine any statistical differences between the rankings of decision making factors before and after engagement with Contents Under Pressure. Simulating process safety decision making with interactive educational supports may increase students’ understanding of genuine workplace environments and factors that contribute to process safety, without the real world hazards that result from poor decision making. By understanding how students prioritize these factors, chemical engineering curricula can be adapted to focus on the areas of process safety decision making where students need the largest improvement, thereby better preparing them to enter the engineering workforce. 

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