More than 400 communities in the Pacific Northwest are at higher risk of wildfires than first thought, according to an Oregon State University researcher. A joint study between OSU and The Nature Conservancy shows how these findings can help prevention and recovery efforts for vulnerable communities.
Andy McEvoy, a faculty research assistant at OSU’s College of Forestry, led the creation of a tool that assesses risk across the region. He said besides environmental factors, there’s the social vulnerability index: the relative ability of communities to prepare for and recover from wildfires based on socioeconomic characteristics.
“There are some communities that are both in high hazard regions, but also experiencing relatively high degrees of social vulnerability,” McEvoy told KLCC. “And this analysis sort of highlights them as potential priorities for investment in the future, in the way that they have not been in the past.”
Examples include Warm Springs, Oregon and Goldendale, Washington.
Many such risk-prone sites are in dry, rural areas with less than 5,000 structures.
There were also areas that —when social vulnerability, structure density and environmental hazard were incorporated —saw their wildfire risk increase significantly. These included the Oregon towns of Cave Junction, La Pine and Glendale and the Washington towns of Selah, White Salmon and Ellensburg.
McEvoy is hopeful that these findings will determine effective distribution of wildfire mitigation and recovery funds, as determined by lawmakers, state and federal agencies, and other stakeholders.
“They've been officially and unofficially sort of mandated to account for social vulnerability when they decide how to invest in wildfire risk reduction,” said McEvoy. “And that's been a sticking point for a lot of those agencies figuring out what data to use, how to balance environmental hazard, the likelihood of a fire and fire behavior, with the hazard that's caused by social vulnerability or the social socioeconomic characteristics.”
With the 2026 wildfire season looking like a potentially volatile one, and with the resources from the federal government looking restrained due to budget cuts and reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service, spending strategically is going to be key in stretching wildfire control efforts for the foreseeable future.
“We only have so much money, we've got to prioritize where we put it to have the greatest impact,” said McEvoy.
As for future areas of research, McEvoy said infrastructure vulnerability is another component that’s important.
“The types of buildings, the spacing between buildings, how many buildings are in a community, what the buildings are made out of,” he explained. “And so future work is seeking to sort of integrate this third component in a more robust way.”
The study was funded by the U.S. Forest Service, and can be found in Environmental Research Letters.
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