10 minute read
Wildfire Magazine Q2 2024
A CALL TO ACTION
RETHINKING STRATEGY IN WILDFIRE RESPONSE
BY BRAD PIETRUSZKA, DAVE CALKIN, MATT THOMPSON, AND STEPHEN FILLMORE
Expected future scenarios including climate change, a greater incidence of urban conflagrations, and continued fuel-load accumulations will increase demands on the wildfire management system in the United States, resulting in increased difficulty managing wildfires. There is a need to expand concepts of effectiveness to manage more extreme and complex events.
Fires nominally managed under the same defined strategy (for example, full suppression) can have widely divergent resource needs, tactics, and timeframes. The increase in hazards during wildfire operations is leading to shifts in how fires are engaged, even when rapid containment is the most desired objective. The need to improve systems of understanding, developing, and communicating wildfire strategies is a key source of leverage to mitigate the consequences of increasing workload and complexity on a system under duress.
Ensuring sound strategy is essential as wildfire response systems continue to be tested by these pressures. However, these issues, as well as many unforeseen, will challenge our ability to effectively convey the rationale behind a chosen strategy, connect it to outcomes, and learn from it.
The current understanding and approach for developing and communicating wildfire response strategy is insufficient to meet these challenges.
Arguably, some of these issues are systemic and originate at least in part from the current framing of the problem, in which the wildfire itself is the problem.
There is an urgent need to convene greater dialog within the fire management community around the idea and application of strategy. Given the recent evolutions in strategic guidance, now is an opportune time. The USDA Forest Service issued a Wildfire Crisis Strategy in early 2022 that emphasizes returning fire to fire-prone forests. The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy was updated in 2023 with an addendum that also identifies a need to increase the use of proactive fire. The US Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commissioner’s final report similarly echoes these aims. The wildland fire community has a unique window of opportunity to capitalize on the convergence and momentum of these calls for change.
WHAT IS STRATEGY?
The concept of strategy is often misunderstood and misapplied; improvement of the core concept is critical to improvement. The US Marine Corps War College Strategy states that “In its simplest form, strategy is a theory on how to achieve a stated goal.” Within the world of wildland fire, we can and do learn from military strategic victories and defeats, yet the framing of these lessons is around the outcome of the battle,
with less attention paid to the uncertainties faced and trade-offs made by commanders. There are valuable lessons in understanding key tenets of applied military strategy, yet wildland fire practitioners must reckon with the fact that war with fire, as viewed in the traditional sense, is inherently un-winnable. Fire and land managers must begin to think about wildland fire differently to make progress against the threats it poses.
Other fields, such as business management, have similar views of strategy, but framed with alternative lenses and complementary insights. In a 1996 article What is Strategy, Michael Porter describes the essence of strategy as making trade-offs, choosing what not to do, and deploying a system of combined, aligned activities. In the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt says strategy requires diagnosing the challenge to be overcome, providing guiding policies, and identifying a set of coherent actions; doing this frames the addressable challenges to be surmounted and then establishes overall direction and guardrails to implement actions. Both authors suggest that strategy is about problem solving through creativity, design, and iteration. Importantly, by first understanding the problem and framing it correctly, objectives become
not about predefined inputs into a decision process, but about meaningfully measuring progress towards achieving the strategy.
In other words, objectives emerge from the process of strategy setting – they shouldn’t pre-empt it. Objectives are unsupported if they come before critical analysis of a challenge. While goals should guide the direction organizations take, objectives should measure progress toward achieving strategies that overcome specific problems. In sum, strategy setting is about problem framing, focus, co-ordination, and tailoring solutions to specific problems or opportunity – and there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
INCIDENT STRATEGIES FOR WILDFIRE
The Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) reporting system provides four incident strategy options from which fire managers can choose. Through our research and professional observations, we believe that none of the four options provides a holistic representation of a strategy on their own, or in combination. Also, simply reporting portions of each option does not solve this. The current definitions of each ICS-209 strategy option are shown on page 28.
There is an urgent need to for more dialog within the fire management community around the idea and application of strategy for wildland fire management, according to the authors. Photo by Ari Lightsey.
ROADMAP FOR IMPROVEMENT
More than a century of fighting wildfire in the United States has created an acknowledged fire paradox; past wins (successful suppression) have significantly contributed to current losses (the wildfire crisis). Viewing fire as the enemy to overcome continues an unsustainable cycle of fire exclusion, resulting in increasing costs and losses. Reframing the understanding and communication of the problem may improve outcomes. We propose the following definition of wildfire strategy: the focused set of actions taken to address incident level challenges, guided by seeking the best balance of risk to lives, communities, and landscapes.
We offer several ideas for improving strategy. First, we believe a big part of the solution is a fundamental shift in how the wildfire problem is framed. Describing specific challenges presented by a fire that need to be overcome, and why, could improve communication, versus describing only actions unlinked from the meaning behind them. Specific and clear language is necessary to communicate the risks to values and firefighters, and the trade-offs that managers must make to limit those risks as fully as practicable.
Developing strategies framed around specific addressable challenges has had some success in the United States with the evolution of the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP). ISAP is a continuation of previous risk management efforts, such as the 2016 USDA Forest Service’s Life First Initiative, which led to the advent of Risk Management Assistance Teams from 2017 to 2019. ISAP provides a framework through which agency administrators and incident management teams can anchor strategic conversations to a set of four pillars: critical values at risk; strategic actions; responder risk; and probability of success. This framework allows managers to have risk-informed dialog with key partners, stakeholders, and Indigenous leaders while developing strategies that leverage analytics and data in addition to experience and judgement. Discussing risks to lives, communities, and landscapes instead of debating and reporting categorizations such as full suppression or monitor, may improve the basis upon which strategy is built, communicated, and applied.
WE PROPOSE THE FOLLOWING DEFINITION: WILDFIRE STRATEGY IS THE FOCUSED SET OF ACTIONS TAKEN TO ADDRESS INCIDENT LEVEL CHALLENGES, GUIDED BY SEEKING THE BEST BALANCE OF RISK TO LIVES, COMMUNITIES, AND LANDSCAPES.
More than a century of fighting wildfire in the United States has created a fire paradox; past wins (successful suppression) have significantly contributed to current losses (the wildfire crisis).
Photo by Ari Lightsey.
While certainly not the only answer, we believe that part of the answer is a better understanding and execution of strategy.
The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. government determination or policy. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.
This material was prepared by federal government employees as part of their official duties and therefore is in the public domain and can be reproduced at will. Inclusion in a private publication that is itself copyrighted does not nullify the public domain designation of this material.
A wildland fire strategy needs to consider how decision makers can best reduce risk and complexity – not only for an individual fire, but for coming years and decades. Photo by Ari Lightsey.
Brad Pietruszka is a fire management specialist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program, Wildfire Risk Management Science Team. His position spans boundaries between research and practice, aligning the needs of the field with research directions and encouraging the adoption of the best available science in fire management. Pietruszka spent most of his career in fire and fuels management in several federal agencies before joining the WRMS team, and is a complex operations section chief, strategic operational planner, and long-term analyst. He is a co-developer of the incident strategic alignment process for strategic risk management in wildfire response.
Dave Calkin, PhD, is a supervisory research forester with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program, Wildfire Risk Management Science Team. Calkin’s work is designed to improve risk-informed decision making through innovative science development, application, and delivery incorporating economics with risk and decision sciences. His research interests include risk assessment, collaborative wildfire mitigation and response planning, suppression effectiveness, and risk informed decision making. Calkin developed and leads the Wildfire Risk Management Science team within the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Matt Thompson, PhD, is the director of applied fire science at Pyrologix, a subsidiary of Vibrant Planet. Prior to joining Pyrologix, Thompson spent 14 years in the Human Dimensions Program at the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, Wildfire Risk Management Science Team.
Stephen Fillmore works for the USFS Region 5 Regional Office, where he serves as the regional fuels operations specialist. His portfolio focuses on working with National Forests and their partners to increase the amount and quality of wildfire fuels mitigation work accomplished within California and the Pacific Islands. Fillmore also actively works in wildfire management as a complex incident commander, operations section chief, and Type 1 burn boss. He recently finished his PhD from the University of Idaho where his dissertation focused on wildfire decision making within the context of wildfires managed for an objective other than full suppression.
Dave Calkin, PhD, is a supervisory research forester with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program, Wildfire Risk Management Science Team. Calkin’s work is designed to improve risk-informed decision making through innovative science development, application, and delivery incorporating economics with risk and decision sciences. His research interests include risk assessment, collaborative wildfire mitigation and response planning, suppression effectiveness, and risk informed decision making. Calkin developed and leads the Wildfire Risk Management Science team within the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Dave Calkin, PhD, is a supervisory research forester with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program, Wildfire Risk Management Science Team. Calkin’s work is designed to improve risk-informed decision making through innovative science development, application, and delivery incorporating economics with risk and decision sciences. His research interests include risk assessment, collaborative wildfire mitigation and response planning, suppression effectiveness, and risk informed decision making. Calkin developed and leads the Wildfire Risk Management Science team within the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station.
