Wildfire vulnerability refers to the potential damages caused by wildfires on a particular territory, including the losses directly caused by fires but also the ability (or lack of) to recover afterwards. A vulnerable territory would be an area with high values (either socio-economic or ecological), which will be lost (or a significant part of them) by the effects of fire, and it will have little capacity to recuperate those pre-fire values. Generally speaking, vulnerability encompasses several thematic elements (e.g., social, economic, physical, ecological, institutional) describing a broad range of phenomena. Since wildfires impact both socio-economic values (human lives, public health, houses, infrastructures), ecosystem services and ecological values (soil fertility and water holding capacity, biodiversity, protected areas, etc.), fire vulnerability can be approached from different perspectives.
Societal vulnerability to wildfires may be understood as both the magnitude of the socio-economic impacts deriving from wildfires, and the inability of local societies to cope with stressors to which they are exposed as a consequence of a wildfire [1] [2]. However, from an ecological point of view, vulnerability has been defined as the interaction among exposure, resistance (also named coping capacity) and recovery potential (also called adaptive capacity) [3]. Leaving aside exposure (covered in Exposure), several authors defined sensitivity as the degree to which a system is affected or harmed by the disturbance, as an intrinsic feature of the system, but also driven by local environmental conditions [3:1]. Resilience includes coping capacity, which indicates the resistance of the ecosystem to be negatively affected by the fire, and the ability to recover. Therefore, vulnerability is linked to resilience as its ‘flip side’ [4], which includes the resistance to the fire disturbance, as well as its recovery trajectory [5], that is, its capacity to return to near-prior conditions [6]. In practical terms, the assessment of vulnerability requires considering not only the spatial and temporal scales, but also the hierarchical scales, from the individual organisms and the structural and functional relationships between them, to the abiotic environment [7]. All these reflect the inherent intricacy of ecological systems which makes their vulnerability rather difficult to quantify and reduce to a single or few metrics [8].
A longer-term perspective is to characterize the end-point impact and its deviation from the pre-disturbance stage so that the system is considered as vulnerable when not recovering, resilient when recovering at a similar state variable than before the disturbance, or adaptive when recovering at a higher state variable than before the disturbance [9] [10].
Return to Conceptual Framework Diagram
Oliveira, S., Félix, F., Nunes, A., Lourenço, L., Laneve, G., & Sebastián-López, A. (2018). Mapping wildfire vulnerability in Mediterranean Europe. Testing a stepwise approach for operational purposes. Journal of Environmental Management, 206, 158-169. ↩︎
Oliveira, S., Gonçalves, A., Benali, A., Sá, A., Zêzere, J.L., & Pereira, J.M. (2020). Assessing Risk and Prioritizing Safety Interventions in Human Settlements Affected by Large Wildfires. Forests, 11, 859. ↩︎
Turner, B.L., Kasperson, R.E., Matson, P.A., McCarthy, J.J., Corell, R.W., Christensen, L., Eckley, N., Kasperson, J.X., Luers, A., & Martello, M.L. (2003). A framework for vulnerability analysis in sustainability science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 8074-8079. ↩︎ ↩︎
Kasperson, R.E., & Kasperson, J.X. (2001). Climate change, vulnerability and social justice. Stockholm: Stockholm Environment Institute. ↩︎
Weisshuhn, P., Müller, F., & Wiggering, H. (2018). Ecosystem vulnerability review: proposal of an interdisciplinary ecosystem assessment approach. Environmental management, 61, 904-915. ↩︎
Swanston, C.W., Janowiak, M.K., Brandt, L.A., Butler, P.R., Handler, S.D., Shannon, P.D., Derby Lewis, A., Hall, K., Fahey, R.T., Scott, L., Kerber, A., Miesbauer, J.W., & Darling, L. (2016). Forest Adaptation Resources: Climate Change Tools and Approaches for Land Managers 2nd ed. In. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. ↩︎
De Lange, H., Sala, S., Vighi, M., & Faber, J.H. (2010). Ecological vulnerability in risk assessment—A review and perspectives. Science of the Total Environment, 408, 3871-3879. ↩︎
Beroya-Eitner, M.A. (2016). Ecological vulnerability indicators. Ecological indicators, 60, 329-334. ↩︎
Ingrisch, J., & Bahn, M. (2018). Towards a Comparable Quantification of Resilience. Trends In Ecology & Evolution, 33, 251-259. ↩︎
Lei, Y., Wang, J.a., Yue, Y., Zhou, H., & Yin, W. (2014). Rethinking the relationships of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation from a disaster risk perspective. Natural hazards, 70, 609-627. ↩︎