The need for adaptation is especially acute in California, where 15 of the 20 most destructive fires on record have occurred since 2015, and climate change is projected to exacerbate wildfire risk. Record-setting losses in recent years have triggered new urgency for households, businesses, and governments to adjust to increasing risk. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.ĭriven by climate change, development patterns, and forest management practices, wildfires pose a large and growing threat to communities around the world. The scripts used in this analysis are available at the Carolina Data Repository ( ).įunding: C.B.F received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support this work. The property-specific data, including locations, characteristics, sale prices, sale dates, and assessed values are provided through a data use agreement with CoreLogic and can only be accessed through CoreLogic. The income and race data used are publicly available through the US Census Bureau (). The wildfire projections used are publicly available through Cal-Adapt’s website.

They also provide the fire perimeter data publicly through their GIS database. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: California’s fire hazard severity zone maps are publicly available at Cal Fire’s website. Received: ApAccepted: DecemPublished: February 15, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Hino, Field. University of Southern Queensland, AUSTRALIA The discrepancies between dimensions indicates that considering fire frequency can support efforts to equitably target risk management resources.Ĭitation: Hino M, Field CB (2023) Fire frequency and vulnerability in California.

This relationship between income and fire experience may be a reflection of the impacts of repeated fires relative to mapped hazards or single fires, or it could point to a relationship between income and the success of fire prevention or suppression. Warming over the remainder of the century could add tens of thousands of homes to high-experience zones. Home values have grown more slowly in communities with high fire experience, translating to differences in total appreciation of $165M-$630M per year relative to communities with no fire experience. High-hazard communities average higher incomes than low- and no-hazard communities conversely, communities with high fire experience average lower incomes than those with little to no experience. This analysis of three decades of fire footprints, hazard maps, and census and real estate data shows that communities with high fire experience differ substantially from communities with high fire hazard. Government hazard maps are often used to identify at-risk areas, but hazard zones and fire experience may have different implications for communities. Wildfires pose a large and growing threat to communities across California, and understanding fire vulnerability and impacts can enable more effective risk management.

California wildfires 2020 map