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Homeowner wildfire risk mitigation and preparedness are important components of community wildfire readiness. This report describes the data collected through two efforts conducted in the Nikiski, Alaska, study area: (1) parcel-level rapid wildfire risk assessments performed by trained assessors and (2) homeowner surveys in which respondents provided self-assessments of their parcel-level wildfire risk. This project was undertaken to support the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management, and the Nikiski Fire Service Area to inform decisions about wildfire adaptation. The household surveys explored the social dimensions of wildfire, including understanding of wildfire risk, outreach or communication preferences, mitigation and evacuation preparedness activities, and perceptions of community risk reduction strategies. The results provide evidence that despite some results seeming to suggest lower wildfire risk perceptions, respondents indicate taking action to reduce risk on their properties, support fuels management on adjacent public lands, and express interest in opportunities to undertake both mitigation and emergency preparedness activities to reduce risks associated with the threat of wildfire.
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Collective responsibility in wildfire mitigation: optimizing subsidies for enhancing community resilience
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2237380
- PAR ID:
- 10662425
- Publisher / Repository:
- CIMNE
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.23967/icossar.2025.008
