Suchergebnisse

We describe recent advances in biophysical and social aspects of risk and their potential combined contribution to improve mitigation planning on fire‐prone landscapes. The methods and tools provide an improved method for defining the spatial extent of wildfire risk to communities compared to current planning processes. They also propose an expanded role for social science to improve understanding of community‐wide risk perceptions and to predict property owners' capacities and willingness to mitigate risk by treating hazardous fuels and reducing the susceptibility of dwellings. In particular, we identify spatial scale mismatches in wildfire mitigation planning and their potential adverse impact on risk mitigation goals. Studies in other fire‐prone regions suggest that these scale mismatches are widespread and contribute to continued wildfire dwelling losses. We discuss how risk perceptions and behavior contribute to scale mismatches and how they can be minimized through integrated analyses of landscape wildfire transmission and social factors that describe the potential for collaboration among landowners and land management agencies. These concepts are then used to outline an integrated socioecological planning framework to identify optimal strategies for local community risk mitigation and improve landscape‐scale prioritization of fuel management investments by government entities.

Abstract
Climate change is threatening forest ecosystem services, but people who manage their own forestland are in a unique position to observe these threats and take steps to reduce their impacts, especially if they believe that climate change is a contributing factor. We investigate the nature of the relationship between small woodland owner experiences of drought and severe storms and climate change belief in the upper midwestern United States using survey data and structural equation modeling. We find for both events that experience has a modest, positive effect on climate change belief, but only indirectly through perceptions of changing trends in these types of events. In addition, we find that trend perception and climate change belief have an important reciprocal relationship. Our findings suggest that experience as well as cognitive biases are related to believing in climate change, and that greater attention should be given to the potential of bidirectional relationships between key concepts related to climate change belief.

Significance Statement
Belief in climate change increases the likelihood of supporting and participating in climate change mitigation actions. We wanted to better understand the relationships between experiencing severe weather events, believing in global climate change, and noticing changes in the local patterns of severe weather events. Using data from a survey of individual and family forestland owners, also known as small woodland owners, in the upper Midwest, we found that severe weather experience increases climate change belief by increasing the perception that severe weather event trends are changing. The nature of this relationship is also important for informing how future analyses are constructed to avoid misleading findings that overestimate the influence that severe weather experience has on climate change belief.