Assessing the Social Organization of Forest Restoration in Northwest Forest Plan Wildfire Crisis Strategy Landscapes: Industry, Workforce, Communities, and Well-being

Project ID: 23-JV-11261996-072

Federal Agency: U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station

Partner Institution: University of Oregon

Fiscal Year: 2023

Initial Funding: $30,000

Total Funding: $35,667

Principal Investigator: Coughlan, Michael

Agreement Technical Representative: Beshears, Daniel

Abstract: 

Background: There is growing recognition that climate change and increasingly long and severe wildfire seasons demand that forest management respond by intensifying efforts to improve forest resilience and socio-ecological resilience overall (Long 2009; McWethy et al. 2019; Pritchard 2021). The task of restoring forest resilience across the American West is immense and will require costly collective action that facilitates management activity across multiple land ownerships (Charley et al. 2020, 2017). Some of this activity is already occurring within the context of state-led leadership under the Farm Bill, Good Neighbor Authority and other cross-boundary, all lands activities (Charley et al. 2017).

More recently, in early 2022, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) released a Ten-Year Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) to address the wildfire crisis nationwide. The WCS aims to scale-up fuels reduction and restoration treatments by millions of acres across land ownerships in the coming decade. The agency also identified a set of landscapes where wildfire risk is high and initial investments will be made to reduce wildfire risk through forest restoration and fuels reduction treatments; five are located in Washington and Oregon., However, these recent strategies guiding new and significant investments in forest management have prioritized areas at high risk for exposure to wildfire without explicit consideration of the socioeconomic capacities of those landscapes to accomplish the work. In comparison to other areas of the Western US, the Pacific Northwest is still positioned to leverage the wood products markets, infrastructure, and workforce provided by private industry to accomplish these lofty goals. Nonetheless, the economic assets of forest management are not equally positioned to meet this newly emerging demand, nor are they evenly distributed across the region.