Last week, Nevada County OES had the opportunity to showcase the Roadmap to Resilience at the 10th International Fire Ecology and Management Congress. The 2023 event, hosted by the Association for Fire Ecology in cooperation with the California Fire Science Consortium, brought together a diverse group of scientists, educators, students, managers, practitioners, and policymakers to learn about best-practices and cutting-edge approaches to fire ecology being implemented across the globe.
OES was invited to participate in a special session titled “Post-Fire Community Recovery: Research on the Social and Policy Contexts that Facilitate Response and Readiness” alongside speakers from Colorado, New Mexico, and Oregon. The panel addressed policy challenges, multi-jurisdictional post-fire recovery, and how local government and non-profit networks can support community recovery.
The OES presentation, “Roadmap to Resilience: Building Partnerships at all Scales to Deploy Place-Based Solutions” highlighted Nevada County’s efforts to “reverse engineer” recovery by using the outcomes of our Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP), Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP), and Evacuation Study to pinpoint mitigation steps that can be proactively taken now, in order to reduce the likelihood that reactive measures will be needed in the aftermath of a catastrophic event.
Core to the success of this approach has been the commitment of OES to “meet the community where they are at” so that we can better understand the nexus between hazards and what our community has identified that they value and thus want to protect. To this end, OES attended over 190 events in 2023, including 70 between June and August as part of our effort to solicit feedback via our Community Wildfire Protection Plan Survey. The CWPP survey garnered participation by 2,262 residents and has been instrumental in our wildfire mitigation planning efforts.
OES was applauded as being innovative among presenters by highlighting the importance of engaging partners and identifying solutions at all scales and for working to frontload the recovery process by committing to resilience actions now and not later.
