A REMARKABLE FEAT
BY LAURA KING
In the first quarter 2024 issue of Wildfire, I noted that it’s a remarkable feat, planning a conference that will run simultaneously on three continents.
The 7th International Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference April 15-19 in Boise, Canberra, and Tralee (pages 34-48) was, indeed, remarkable – a global event with dozens of speakers and hundreds of delegates from around the world. There were Americans in Canberra, Australians in Tralee, and Europeans in Boise.
All three iterations of #FBF2024 comprised field trips, presentations, networking, and promises to share solutions rather than have multiple people in different places working out the same problems.
As Richard McCrea writes (page 38), almost 400 delegates from 10 countries gathered in Boise, where the opening keynote session by U.S. Fire Administrator Dr. Lori Moore-Merrill was streamed live to Canberra.
On July 17, Moore-Merrill and the United States Fire Administration released a tool to help communities and firefighters be better informed about wildfire urban interface vulnerabilities – the WUI Awareness | FEMA Geospatial Resource Centre (https://gis-fema. hub.arcgis.com/pages/wui-awareness). The tool helps inform residents in fire-prone areas about wildland fire and explains how embers from WUI fires can ignite their homes.
In March, Moore-Merrill testified before the U.S. Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs about the evolving threats of wildland fire, noting that “It is imperative that states and local officials adopt, implement, and enforce the national wildland urban interface building code,” and that “current approaches to wildfire mitigation and management do not match the scale of the issue.”
The USFA and other federal agencies led the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, which made 148 recommendations, including putting more focus and resources toward proactive pre-fire and postfire planning to break the cycle of increasingly severe wildfire risk, damages, and losses.
A key theme of the report was modernizing tools for informed decision-making including measures to better coordinate, integrate, and strategically align fire-related science, data, and technology.
As Brad Pietruszka, Dave Calkin, Matt Thompson, and Stephen Fillmore write in A call to action, Rethinking strategy in wildfire response, (pages 24-32), the concept of strategy is often misunderstood and misapplied in wildland fire. The authors “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,” and explore known strategy options – full suppression, point / zone protection, confine, and monitor. Ultimately, the authors conclude that “communicating strategy . . . will be critical . . . What you are doing and why, as well as what you are not doing and why, would describe a chosen strategy in more definitive terms and the current approach.”
Through a journalist’s lens, Lily Mayers looks at strategy and land management on the Iberian Peninsula, the growing incidence of megafires (pages 14-22), and the impact of weather and climate change.
Weather and climate were key topics at the Fire Behavior and Fuels sessions in Canberra (pages 38-40), and Tralee (pages 42-48). Weather was also a topic of conversation in Tralee, with many North American delegates unprepared for the volume of precipitation while the properly kitted Irish hosts simply shrugged off downpours and trudged on through the wind and rain.
Former IAWF board member Steve Miller was on hand in Tralee to summarize three days of presentations, discussion, insight and revelations. Miller’s notes (page 48) are testament to the breadth of discussion, the global nature of the conference(s), and the depth of the takeaways.
It was a remarkable feat, planning a conference that ran simultaneously and smoothly on three continents. More remarkable will be the actions of those who attended to achieve the agreed upon next steps and new approaches to wildland fire management around the globe.
