Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives

Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives (Electronic book text)

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DEFRA and one of its agencies, Natural England, have responsibility for land management policy through agri-environment subsidies and wildlife conservation. To a smaller degree, the Department for Transport has responsibility for transport infrastructure, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change for adaptation measures and impacts on energy production and infrastructure. For severe incidents, however, a multi-agency response is adopted during the response phase, as with other hazards. Thus, there is a clear disconnect between the holistic approach required and fragmentation of management at different phases of the whole hazard chain.

We will show that community-based cross-sector networks have emerged to redress this disconnect, as have cross-agency working groups; for example, DEFRA's current Uplands Management Group. Central Government's growing recognition that wildfire is not just a fire service issue but also a land management and environmental one is recent, and was catalysed by the climate change agenda and Forestry Commission initiatives. National policy is to intervene relatively late in the hazard chain, focusing on suppression, with less attention to the socio-ecological context in which fires start and spread [ 41 ].

While suppression may be the appropriate response in a densely populated country like the UK, there are dangers inherent in zero tolerance. In fire-prone countries, removing all fire from an ecosystem in the absence of other measures allows fuel to accumulate, increasing the danger of more intense future fires [ 42 ].

Fuel load management through burning, cutting or grazing, and working collaboratively with land managers to improve prevention, preparedness and response to wildfires, may reduce FRS call-outs and help firefighter safety [ 26 , p. Improving ecological resilience by re-wetting degraded peat moorlands may also reduce incidents [ 16 ]. The norm is to view any such vegetation fire as hazard. The strong focus on carbon and peatlands in the UK, for instance by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's UK Peatland Programme [ 43 ], has tended to reinforce the view that all fire on moorlands overlying deep peat is bad, whether wildfire or controlled land management burns [ 44 ].

1. Introduction

Restrictions on agricultural straw burning in England and Wales after [ 45 ] are another sign that fire is being excluded from rural culture, rather than being seen as part of the process of land management. Policy towards wildfire in the UK shows a pattern of evolution, starting with recognition of a problem followed by gradual emergence of solutions. Community-based solutions first appeared at local, regional and then national levels during the 's, long before formal awareness and government policy began to deal with the issue.

These local wildfire groups and later regional and national forums evolved in response to crisis events. A patchwork of local solutions developed in Scotland, across England and in Wales from this bottom-up process. Knowledge of wildfire management has grown within these informal networks and diffused upwards from local and regional to national. Local stakeholders have taken ownership of the wildfire problem, forming wildfire groups in collaboration with local FRS and working across conventional institutional boundaries. It exemplifies innovation distributed across an informal network, with the Peak District National Park Authority acting as initiator and knowledge broker.

Members include the six FRS within the Park, local water companies, amenity groups and landowners. It became a model for other local wildfire groups, as has its Scottish equivalent, the South Grampians wildfire group. Knowledge on the management of wildfires has been co-produced by these self-assembling local groups. Examples include local fire plans with inventories of firefighting equipment, emergency contacts, vehicle rendezvous and access points, and sources of water for firefighting.

Neighbouring FRS collaborate, adopting the same size hoses and couplings to overcome problems of interoperability. This knowledge-making has been spontaneous and stakeholder-led [ 47 ]. For example, the Peak District Fire Operations Group wildfire suppression training programme included novel topics such as working with helicopters, thereby co-opting pilots as new stakeholders into the wildfire management process.

In this way, the local Group was re-negotiated to incorporate new members as understanding of the problem accumulated with cooperation, experience and induced inventive learning [ 49 ] to form a high-reliability network [ 50 ]. As a result, knowledge of wildfire management began to be distributed horizontally around informal networks across the UK, with each group pursuing locally situated agendas [ 54 ]. The Peak District developed expertise in rapid fire suppression using helicopters, as their overriding priority was to prevent damage to peat and drinking water supplies.

Northumberland developed skills in back burning, borrowed from Catalonia, as a low-cost technique to control fire spread, as they had few firefighting resources in a sparsely populated county. In this fashion, a grass-roots response to local problems generated a variety of outcomes. But the uneven spatial coverage of fire groups and the absence of a national integrated approach to wildfire management mean that an institutionally fragmented approach to managing wildfire still persists. Tensions may exist within cross-sector groups [ 55 ].

Fire has long been used as a management tool in UK uplands, but traditional practice does not meet with approval from those concerned with damage to peat, birdlife or water quality. Moorland managers and nature conservation groups have divergent attitudes to controlled burning on upland peat, including whether burning reduces wildfire risk through fuel management, or increases it due to escaped fires and by promoting more fire-prone, less ecologically resilient habitats. Yet these rival groups coalesce on the need to manage uncontrolled wildfire. Preventing severe wildfire is a uniting boundary concept that both can buy into.

The wider outcome has been a pattern of bottom-up innovation characterized by new forms of management, extensive collaboration across organizational boundaries on issues such as fire plans, new items of equipment and specialized training, well outside the national Fire College training framework. This spread of knowledge developed as regional and national coordinating groups emerged, fostered by key champions. The Scottish Wildfire Forum was set up in after severe wildfires in the hot, dry spring of The model was copied by the English Wildfire Forum in November , spurred by the wildfire season and following discussions between the Chief Fire Officers Association, the Forestry Commission and Natural England.

Heather Trust, Moorland Association and researchers, among others. Both national Forums are therefore cross-sector, multi-agency groups of public, private and third-sector stakeholders established to address wildfire issues but they are non-statutory. In part, they are a response to the spatially uneven coverage of local fire groups and to national fragmentation of responsibility. Their roles include coordination, lobbying for change, serving as centres for knowledge exchange and a point of consultation for government bodies.

University-based knowledge exchange projects have also helped build a cross-disciplinary and cross-sector national wildfire community.

In the process, wildfire was recognized as a semi-natural hazard the vast majority are started by humans , with unique impacts facing civil society and one exacerbated by climate change. Official recognition of wildfire as a significant hazard can be traced back to the Civil Contingencies Act , which addressed any emergency that threatened serious damage to human welfare, environment and the security of the UK [ 59 ].

While the Act required multi-agency collaboration, the choice of DCLG as lead confirmed the Fire Service-centric approach to wildfire risk management. While recognition on the National Risk Register undoubtedly raised the profile of wildfire widely within and beyond the fire service, it also reinforces the view of vegetation fire as hazard, with no ecological or fuel management benefits. The severe spring fire season of , and especially the Swinley Forest fire, together with contingency planning for the London Olympics, brought two changes in government policy towards wildfire.

DCLG was defined as the lead organization for wildfires. Second, in late , the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat produced a guide to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure and essential services. Local Resilience Forums are multi-agency, consisting of Category 1 responders in a Police Area emergency services, including Fire Authorities 14 , Category 2 responders including Local Authorities, the Health and Safety Executive, Environment Agency, as well as invited groups. The emphasis is on multi-agency collaboration.

Each Local Resilience Forum produces a public-facing Community Risk Register, which rates the relative likelihood, impact and risk of locally relevant hazards and threats over the next five years, and makes contingency plans to control them. The five-year span is short relative to the recurrence interval of severe wildfire incidents. This could be seen as a further example of the bottom-up evolution of wildfire risk awareness from regional to national, drawing on the experience of FRS representatives.

In truth though, information flow is two-way; the National Risk Assessment considers significant emerging local risks identified by Local Resilience Forums in their Community Risk Registers, but in turn, Forums are required to consider hazards included in the National Risk Assessment. It requires Fire Authorities to assess the full range of foreseeable FRS-related risks their areas face, to make provision for prevention and protection activities, and to respond to incidents appropriately. Fire Authorities must develop an Integrated Risk Management Plan which considers any emergency, including wildfires, which could affect their community.

This includes cross-border, multi-authority and national risks which, like wildfire, do not respect institutional boundaries. For example, the Sandhurst Fire of affected parts of both Surrey and Berkshire. Integrated Risk Management Plans have to demonstrate how prevention, protection and response activities might best be used to mitigate the impact of incidents on communities in a cost-effective way [ 64 , p. Policy guidance on how this should be achieved for wildfire in Integrated Risk Management Plans was set out in [ 65 ].

Some FRS have embraced wildfire risk in their planning and prevention. Unlike other emergency services, the Fire Service does not have an external inspectorate. DCLG has instead largely devolved assurance in the running of Fire Authorities to the local level, backed by assessment by the National Audit Office [ 66 , 67 ], although their last inspection did not undertake a qualitative analysis of local FRS risk assessment planning. Whatever the inconsistencies, the Integrated Risk Management Planning process does represent the beginnings of a commitment to address the complex issue of wildfire in a significant way.

The participation of some FRS in local fire groups from the s is evidence of growing awareness that they need to involve other stakeholders such as land owners and land managers to help reduce ignitions, and to assist with contingency planning and suppression, especially for rural FRS, which face the brunt of extreme wildfire events but have limited resources to cope. The Act, guidance and National Framework [ 63 , pp.

The concept of local collaborative cross-sector working with land managers to improve response to wildfire incidents therefore became enshrined in national policy. The Association is also working alongside academic partners to refine the way wildfire is defined and evidenced using the Incident Recording System [ 12 ]. The response of wider stakeholders to wildfire in the UK is illustrated by the Forestry Commission, which has an evident interest in avoiding loss of timber and amenity value.

Woodland cover has significantly increased since , with coniferous woodland accounting for just over half of the UK woodland area, although significantly higher in Scotland [ 70 ]. Their analysis of Incident Recording System data has already been discussed. Here, we present three further examples. The introduction of the Incident Recording System helped promote the emergence of standards for defining wildfire. Agreement on standards is crucial to systematic innovation across many sectors [ 71 ].

As a result, UK national reporting requirements were linked for the first time to United Nations and European requirements and should facilitate the inclusion of UK fire statistics into the European Forest Fire Information System [ 73 ]. A key example is the UK Forestry Standard, which helps to ensure that forestry is sustainable and meets international agreements and national legislation [ 74 ].

Legal requirements and good forestry practice are combined with guidelines for compliance from different elements of sustainable forestry management. The Standard requires planning for forest fires; for example, a contingency plan and building resilience through adaptation in age classes, species selection and stand structure. From this document, others cascade down, as discussed next. As a result of the Swinley Forest Fire, the Forestry Commission published practice guidance to help ensure both private and public Forestry Management Plans include mitigation and adaptation to wildfire incidents [ 75 ].

The aim was to move away from over-reliance on linear defences of fire breaks and fire plans to a more inclusive and integrated whole-site prevention approach. The document anticipates the impacts of future climate change, especially in South East England. It covers wildfire behaviour, the need to plan for wildfire, and forest management plans for integrating wildfire resilience.

It highlights forest management techniques to help prevent and improve response when wildfires do occur, including managing vegetation and fuels, creating fire breaks and fire belts and improving forest design; for instance, strategic placement of deciduous tree components to slow fire spread. Scope exists for building silvicultural resilience; deciduous trees are far more fire-resistant than young conifers.

Forestry Commission plans for incident response include provision of circular fire access routes, water supplies and hard standings. It influenced the design of a major housing development adjacent to the Swinley Forest fire site and is recommended by Dorset FRS to help landowners reduce wildfire risk [ 77 ]. It was also used in the redesign of Dorset's Purbeck Forest.

Wildfire policy: Law and economics perspectives

The Forestry Commission's scheme for Dorset's Purbeck Forest in Southern England shows how the potential impact of wildfire can be mitigated by collaborative planning. Partial deforestation of coniferous woodland to generate lowland heath was proposed—a shift to an open, more fire-prone and heavily used ecosystem. Fire would damage the ecosystem and pose a threat to the A35 Trunk Road and the Wytch Farm oil processing facility. An Environmental Impact Assessment screening exercise was undertaken and judged that an Environmental Statement [ 78 ] was required.

In practice, this meant producing fire maps and an action plan, and local training in fighting wildfires.

The danger of climate change has brought wildfire into sharp international focus [ 81 ]. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment identified increased frequency of wildfire as one of seven key risks [ 7 , p. Wildfire was seen as a key cross-sector risk, being cited under biodiversity and ecosystem services [ 83 ] and at least three of the 11 other sector reports 18 , and therefore, one which requires integrated land use and emergency planning. Linkages with other natural hazards were also highlighted; for instance, tree pests and diseases may encourage fire spread [ 84 ].

Climate change will also bring increasing pressure on Fire and other Emergency Services. However, Government is not always consistent in its treatment of the new policy issue of wildfire. Sir Ken Knight's review of proposed Fire Service efficiencies and operations did not address the financial challenges of increasing frequency of wildfires, nor the impacts of a changing climate [ 85 ]. Knowledge and cross-sector structures within the England and Wales Forum were explicitly highlighted and used in the national plan. The Programme identified three vital roles of the Forum in preparing for the impact of climate change on wildfires: In response, the Chief Fire Officers Association produced a report that acknowledged the present and future growing risks of large wildfire incidents, recommending that ideally the risk of severe fires should be considered, and where appropriate addressed, during the development of each relevant FRS Integrated Risk Management Plan [ 87 ].

Natural England also produced a report in which wildfire was considered a high-priority threat to landscapes and biodiversity as well as to public access and engagement [ 88 ]. It highlighted the increasing wildfire risk to heaths, stating that it would define how mitigation of wildfire risk would be encouraged in land management schemes for susceptible habitats. The climate change agenda has therefore been an important driver in raising awareness of wildfire as a cross-sector issue.

For development control planning, there is a risk that major residential developments will be situated next to high-risk wildfire sites in the rural—urban interface, posing a risk to public health and safety. For example, a pilot study of a sample area of 11 by 12 km around the area of the Swinley Forest fire showed there are 33 care homes for the elderly in the area, six of which are adjacent to fire-prone heathland [ 89 ].

However, planners' awareness of wildfire risk in the UK rural—urban interface remains low. This is because the planning process is reactive; it responds to severe events, and return periods for severe wildfire are typically longer than the political cycle. Policy instruments therefore do not specifically identify wildfire, and suitable tools to quantify wildfire risk are not yet widely available. The National Planning Policy Framework for England and Wales was developed to simplify the numerous Planning Policy Statements and Guidance that have evolved over the past few decades, and to ensure a correct balance between sustainable social, economic and environmental development.

Policy 99 suggests planning authorities should anticipate the impact of climate change over the longer term.

In all cases, natural hazards and climate change tacitly include wildfire, however, until it is overtly specified, wildfire will continue to be overlooked in most planning decisions. Further, no real traction is likely until tools are developed to quantify and map wildfire likelihood, impact and resulting risk in a similar way to flooding, for example, using wildfire threat analysis as adopted in New Zealand [ 92 , 93 ]. It took severe flooding before risk mapping tools were established.

Regrettably, it will take more severe events like Swinley Forest to put wildfire firmly on Planning's radar. Use of planning policy to help adaptation to wildfire is a common approach in North America and Australia. Anticipation of wildfire is embedded into integrated land use planning, habitat management and building regulations.

This joined-up approach builds resilience to all but the most extreme bushfire incidents. With the pressure to build more houses, especially in South East England, greater emphasis in the planning system is placed on protecting surrounding priority species and habitats. Perversely, land management for purely conservation objectives can be inappropriate for wildfire mitigation and adaptation, creating greater risk to the public and the wider environment.

Providing more green infrastructure also represents more fuel. Greater effort is needed to engage this sector. The response to wildfire in the UK remains varied, fragmented and incomplete at local level. National policy is related to goals such as disaster management and adaptation to climate change.

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Responsibility for the single problem of wildfire is fragmented across government departments. There is a need to overcome the challenges of complexity and fragmentation by introducing a clear policy, at least towards potential severe wildfires. In effect, policy needs to act as a selection mechanism to pick the best features of the community-based response at local level and to combine initiatives at the national level. To some extent a pragmatic solution is emerging as groups such as the England and Wales Wildfire Forum become de facto consultative panels for government.

Of the 10 policy outcomes for managing wildfire risk in the rural? In the USA, however, a national policy framework already existed through Federal institutions such as the National Park Service [ 97 ]. Rather, local responses have recently emerged because of a need to align the scale of decision-making with direct experience of those who bear the consequences of those decisions. In the USA, there is a clear process of modifying existing institutions to respond better to local community needs.

Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives (Electronic book text)

In effect, the process of adaptive governance seen with wildfire in the USA has been reversed in the UK. Instead of governance spreading from central control towards local solutions, in the UK, the evolution of local solutions has prompted ad hoc coordination at local and national level. In turn, this has influenced the formal policy of government as it evolved through emergency planning and climate change legislation. It is now argued that the USA needs to move towards a position where communities work hand in hand with planners, architects and land managers to coexist with wildfire [ ].

These recommendations have strong echoes of the emergence of local wildfire groups in the UK during the s and accord closely with the goals of the Forestry Commission in managing fire. However, as we have seen, the UK response still largely ignores the role of the UK planning system in anticipating wildfire problems and improving resilience. The UK experiences wildfires annually, but the episodic frequency of severe incidents reduces awareness in wet years.

Return periods for severe wildfire are typically longer than the political cycle and five-year time span considered for emergency planning. Historically limited fire statistics, especially for burnt area, hinder the ability to accurately evidence the issue and quantify risk. Development of agreed standards, pioneered by the Forestry Commission, allowed geo-referenced data on wildfires to be collected in the Incident Recording System for all vegetation fires across GB from , although spatial accuracy and lack of reliable data on fire perimeters limit development of geographic information systems-based risk assessment tools at the local scale.

England does not yet have a specific national wildfire agency or strategy. The now 46 regional FRS have a statutory duty to extinguish wildfires alongside structural fires and other emergency rescue duties. The definition of wildfires is lenient, covering any uncontrolled vegetation fire where a decision or action regarding suppression is required.

The Scottish government identifies the more significant incidents in the Incident Recording System using a definition based primarily on FRS resources and estimated burned area. For England, further work is needed to agree a hierarchy of vegetation fires, which allows for differences in local circumstances between FRS and also suits outcome scenarios used in Community Risk Registers. The FRS-centred approach and resulting suppression paradigm runs the risk of more severe fires in the future, unless other methods of managing fuel and ignition sources are also implemented.

This important international message is not widely realized in the UK. In this respect, recognition as hazard is a double-edged sword, denying beneficial effects of vegetation fire. Successful management requires the adoption of a cross-sector approach at the national scale, not just as now for the emergency response phase of large incidents, but also at the prevention phase. As we have seen, this is beginning to be redressed with wildfire risk assessments now included as conditions of some agri-environment subsidies.

Even now though, such a national cross-sector approach is challenging because of the fragmented responsibility for wildfire at different phases of the hazard chain. Policies which impact on wildfire have evolved separately in each sector and can result in unintended consequences. In the absence of coordinated central policy guidance and spurred by individual champions, community-based solutions gradually emerged during the s, long before formal awareness and government policy began to deal with the issue.

Indeed, these grass-roots responses have diffused upward to facilitate later central government actions. This has happened at two levels; first, local and regional fire groups evolved in response to the crisis events of , , and ; and second, they were followed by national forums, aided by academia-led knowledge exchange initiatives.

FRS facing problems of rural wildfire and limited financial resources were forced to work in partnership with land owners and managers, environmental groups, water authorities and other stakeholders, and to innovate at the local level. These local fire groups took ownership of the wildfire problem, collaborating to gradually develop knowledge and management strategies at scales matched to their own local social and ecological conditions.

On a national scale, the England and Wales Wildfire Forum, Scottish Wildfire Forum and the Chief Fire Officers Association Wildfire Group are helping to spread good practice laterally and vertically, assisted by academic knowledge exchange initiatives. Knowledge of wildfire management has been co-produced by both scales of these self-assembling, informal partnerships, improving local emergency response on the ground and raising government awareness of wildfire.

Both levels fit the evolutionary model in that participatory solutions gradually evolved in a cumulative way and vary between groups [ 8 ]. For national government, both the emergency planning and climate change agenda have been significant catalysts for wildfire awareness and the emergence of cross-sector working. Systematic national policy towards wildfire as hazard began to emerge in , when Government initiated a programme of contingency planning against risks and natural hazards facing civil society.

Crisis events have again been very significant; national awareness of wildfire was spurred by the fire season, and especially by the small but high-impact rural—urban interface fire at Swinley Forest. Risk assessments for the London Olympics also played a part.

The need for national cross-sector collaboration on wildfire was boosted by the Climate Change Risk Assessment in Key stakeholders such as the Forestry Commission have pioneered good practice in adaptive land management to build fire resilience into UK forests by developing best practice guides and evidencing wildfire occurrence from national fire statistics. Their approach has begun to diffuse into local areas adjacent to woodlands, and into broader DEFRA policy for lowland and upland heath.

The Dorset case study shows that potential impact of wildfire can be mitigated by an adaptive collaborative approach to landscape planning, and innovative, but rare and much needed engagement with development control planning. In summary, policy and practice have responded slowly and fitfully to the complexity of the wildfire problem.

Taken overall, wildfire policy exhibits an evolutionary process, where locally adapted participatory solutions have emerged at multiple levels and diffused in response to need, as much as to legislation. The current national policy paradigm is still one of fire suppression in keeping with FRS practice for structural fires. Recognition of severe wildfire as a national hazard has pushed it up the emergency planning agenda, but potentially undermines the longer-term benefits of vegetation fire and its role as a part of the socio-ecological system.

We are still a long way from learning to live with fire, but the need for a risk management approach to wildfire, instead of zero tolerance to all vegetation fires is beginning to be recognized. Progress is being made towards a cross-sector approach that integrates fire and land management, especially at the prevention stage. The grass-roots evolution of participatory solutions has been a key enabling process. A coordinated and funded policy is now needed to identify best practice and promote understanding of the role of fire in UK socio-ecological systems.

Northern Ireland fires were recorded separately, so are not included in this analysis. Northern Ireland fires are recorded separately, so were not included in this analysis. Since 1 April , they cover Great Britain only https: The Incident Recording System still flags primary fires, but reports all vegetation fires equally. They oversee their regional FRS and are funded jointly by central Government and local rates; levied by Local Authorities on residents for provision of essential services, including FRS. Some such as Northumbria, Gloucestershire, Merseyside and Hertfordshire included their own variants and codes for lower severity or spread into the rural—urban interface.

Fatality numbers are low under 10 and casualty figures are between 50 and , primarily as a result of respiratory complaints and burns. Replies were received from 50 of the current total of 54 FRS. Percentages are out of The knowledge exchange elements of this paper were supported by: National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Accepted Feb This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Abstract Severe wildfires are an intermittent problem in England. Introduction a Wildfire policy as an evolutionary process The UK is vulnerable to wildfires. Open in a separate window. Challenges for wildfire management in the UK Severe wildfire was recently officially recognized as a semi-natural hazard by central government, largely due to the unusual nature of its impacts.

Share equipment and training, develop Fire Plans Academic-led initiatives: Legislation, policy and plan implications and opportunities for wildfire in England. This requires the government to: Also to provide mitigation and adaptation within development proposals and plans. It also aligns risks identified in the Climate Change Risk Assessment to actions being undertaken or to be undertaken and the time scales according to each theme. Karen Bradshaw , Dean Lueck. During the five decades since its origin, law and economics has provided an influential framework for addressing a wide array of areas of law ranging from judicial behaviour to contracts.

This book will reflects the first-ever forum for law and economics scholars to apply the analysis and methodologies of their field to the subject of wildfire. The only modern legal work on wildfire, the book brings together leading scholars to consider questions such as: How can public policy address the effects of climate change on wildfire, and wildfire on climate change?

Are the environmental and fiscal costs of ex ante prevention measures justified? What are the appropriate levels of prevention and suppression responsibility borne by private, state, and federal actors? Can tort liability provide a solution for realigning the grossly distorted incentives that currently exist for private landowners and government firefighters? Do the existing incentives in wildfire institutions provide incentives for efficient private and collective action and how might they be improved?

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