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1. Compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion quadruple the likelihood of extreme-impact wildfires in California

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s44304-025-00067-6  

   Kumar, Mukesh; AghaKouchak, Amir; Abatzoglou, John T; Sadegh, Mojtaba (February 2025, npj Natural Hazards)

   Abstract Previous research has examined individual factors contributing to wildfire risk, but the compounding effects of these factors remain underexplored. Here, we introduce the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI)” to quantify the compounding effects of fire-weather intensification and anthropogenic factors—including ignitions and human settlement into wildland—on wildfire risk. While climatic trends increased the frequency of high-risk fire-weather by 2.5-fold, the combination of this trend with wildland-urban interface expansion led to a 4.1-fold increase in the frequency of conditions conducive to extreme-impact wildfires from 1990 to 2022 across California. More than three-quarters of extreme-impact wildfires—defined as the top 20 largest, most destructive, or deadliest events on record—originated within 1 km from the wildland-urban interface. The deadliest and most destructive wildfires—90% of which were human-caused—primarily occurred in the fall, while the largest wildfires—56% of which were human-caused—mostly took place in the summer. By integrating human activity and climate change impacts, we provide a holistic understanding of human-centric wildfire risk, crucial for policy development. 

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2. Cluster-Based Active-Learning Scenario Reduction Framework for Probabilistic Wildfire Risk Assessment

   Jonnalagadda, J; Lee, JY; Sanad, A-A (January 2026, ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering)

   Wildfires pose an escalating risk to communities and infrastructure, especially in regions undergoing increased fuel dryness and temperature extremes driven by climate change, as well as continued expansion into the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Probabilistic wildfire risk assessment provides a rigorous means of quantifying potential impacts, but its application is often hindered by the high computational cost of working with hundreds of thousands of complex wildfire scenarios. This study introduces a novel scenario reduction framework tailored to the unique characteristics of wildfire hazards, which often lack standard intensity metrics and exhibit highly nonlinear, spatially distributed behavior. The proposed framework selects a subset of scenarios that best represent the spatial and statistical diversity of the full dataset, thereby greatly reducing computational costs while accounting for uncertainties. This is achieved by mapping complex wildfire scenarios into a high-dimensional feature space, enabling similarity assessments based on spatial consequence patterns rather than standard intensity metrics. A k-medoids clustering approach is then used to identify a representative subset of scenarios, while an active-learning-based outlier selection procedure incorporates rare but high-impact events without inflating computational demands. The framework was first demonstrated using a simple illustrative example to show how its performance responds to different data characteristics. To further demonstrate the practicality of the framework, it was used for wildfire risk assessment in Spokane County, Washington, where the full dataset (1000 scenarios) was reduced to 41 representative scenarios while preserving the spatial patterns of burn probability and building damage with high fidelity. The results demonstrated that the framework significantly improves computational efficiency and accuracy compared to traditional scenario reduction methods, offering a scalable and flexible tool for probabilistic wildfire risk assessment. 

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3. Adapting western North American forests to climate change and wildfires: ten common questions

   https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2433  

   Prichard, Susan J.; Hessburg, Paul F.; Hagmann, R. Keala; Povak, Nicholas A.; Dobrowski, Solomon Z.; Hurteau, Matthew D.; Kane, Van R.; Keane, Robert E.; Kobziar, Leda N.; Kolden, Crystal A.; et al (August 2021, Ecological Applications)

   null (Ed.)

   We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and prescribed burning solve the problem? (4) Should active forest management, including forest thinning, be concentrated in the wildland urban interface (WUI)? (5) Can wildfires on their own do the work of fuel treatments? (6) Is the primary objective of fuel reduction treatments to assist in future firefighting response and containment? (7) Do fuel treatments work under extreme fire weather? (8) Is the scale of the problem too great – can we ever catch up? (9) Will planting more trees mitigate climate change in wNA forests? and (10) Is post-fire management needed or even ecologically justified? Based on our review of the scientific evidence, a range of proactive management actions are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes and declining forest successional heterogeneity after severe wildfires. Science-based adaptation options include the use of managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and coupled mechanical thinning and prescribed burning as is consistent with land management allocations and forest conditions. Although some current models of fire management in wNA are averse to short-term risks and uncertainties, the long-term environmental, social, and cultural consequences of wildfire management primarily grounded in fire suppression are well documented, highlighting an urgency to invest in intentional forest management and restoration of active fire regimes. 

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4. Exploring and Testing Wildfire Risk Decision-Making in the Face of Deep Uncertainty

   https://doi.org/10.3390/fire6070276  

   Johnson, Bart R.; Ager, Alan A.; Evers, Cody R.; Hulse, David W.; Nielsen-Pincus, Max; Sheehan, Timothy J.; Bolte, John P. (July 2023, Fire)

   We integrated a mechanistic wildfire simulation system with an agent-based landscape change model to investigate the feedbacks among climate change, population growth, development, landowner decision-making, vegetative succession, and wildfire. Our goal was to develop an adaptable simulation platform for anticipating risk-mitigation tradeoffs in a fire-prone wildland–urban interface (WUI) facing conditions outside the bounds of experience. We describe how five social and ecological system (SES) submodels interact over time and space to generate highly variable alternative futures even within the same scenario as stochastic elements in simulated wildfire, succession, and landowner decisions create large sets of unique, path-dependent futures for analysis. We applied the modeling system to an 815 km2 study area in western Oregon at a sub-taxlot parcel grain and annual timestep, generating hundreds of alternative futures for 2007–2056 (50 years) to explore how WUI communities facing compound risks from increasing wildfire and expanding periurban development can situate and assess alternative risk management approaches in their localized SES context. The ability to link trends and uncertainties across many futures to processes and events that unfold in individual futures is central to the modeling system. By contrasting selected alternative futures, we illustrate how assessing simulated feedbacks between wildfire and other SES processes can identify tradeoffs and leverage points in fire-prone WUI landscapes. Assessments include a detailed “post-mortem” of a rare, extreme wildfire event, and uncovered, unexpected stabilizing feedbacks from treatment costs that reduced the effectiveness of agent responses to signs of increasing risk. 

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5. Facilitating water resilience in wildfire affected communities: lessons learned from rapid response research

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2026.1741106  

   Newcomer, Michelle E; González-Pinzón, Ricardo; Siirila-Woodburn, Erica R; Peña, Jasquelin; Underwood, Jennifer C; Webster, Jackson P; Whelton, Andrew J; Im, Jinwoo; Paramasamy, Deepta; Ulrich, Craig; et al (June 2026, Frontiers in Water)

   Wildland–urban interface fires (WUI fires) can pose a significant threat to water resources, including drinking water supplies, water treatment infrastructure, ecosystem function, and agricultural irrigation. Wildfires, especially WUI fires, are expected to increase in frequency and severity. Despite the need for effective mitigation and response strategies for wildfires, rapid research co-production to support decision-making for water incident response and water management is generally limited. This manuscript draws on five U.S. wildfire case studies to highlight how research co-production between scientists, water agencies, and managers supports more effective decision-making for water resilience and recovery. The case studies demonstrate the importance of rapid response activities, coordinating collaborative response, pre-wildfire preparation, and knowledge co-production among agencies, researchers, and managers in addressing the impacts of wildfires on water supply and quality. The lessons learned emphasize opportunities to pivot wildfire-water research and operations from reactive to proactive, focusing on mutually beneficial activities such as understanding watershed health, fostering collaboration, embracing new discoveries and tools, and enabling pre-wildfire research through table-top activities, workshops, pre-fire data collection and analysis, and appointing a central water response lead. These outcomes inform the development of a research-to-operations and operations-to-research (R2O2R) co-production framework and future opportunities to guide proactive response and management efforts before, during, and after wildfire. 

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