School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
The Nature Conservancy, Portland, Oregon, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Nov 2;13(11):e0205825. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205825. eCollection 2018.
Globally, environmental disasters impact billions of people and cost trillions of dollars in damage, and their impacts are often felt most acutely by minority and poor communities. Wildfires in the U.S. have similarly outsized impacts on vulnerable communities, though the ethnic and geographic distribution of those communities may be different than for other hazards. Here, we develop a social-ecological approach for characterizing fire vulnerability and apply it to >70,000 census tracts across the United States. Our approach incorporates both the wildfire potential of a landscape and socioeconomic attributes of overlying communities. We find that over 29 million Americans live with significant potential for extreme wildfires, a majority of whom are white and socioeconomically secure. Within this segment, however, are 12 million socially vulnerable Americans for whom a wildfire event could be devastating. Additionally, wildfire vulnerability is spread unequally across race and ethnicity, with census tracts that were majority Black, Hispanic or Native American experiencing ca. 50% greater vulnerability to wildfire compared to other census tracts. Embracing a social-ecological perspective of fire-prone landscapes allows for the identification of areas that are poorly equipped to respond to wildfires.
从全球范围来看，环境灾害影响了数十亿人，并造成数万亿美元的损失，而少数族裔和贫困社区受到的影响最为严重。美国的野火对弱势群体社区也有类似的巨大影响，但这些社区的种族和地理分布可能与其他灾害不同。在这里，我们开发了一种用于描述火灾脆弱性的社会生态方法，并将其应用于美国超过 70000 个普查区。我们的方法结合了景观的野火潜力和覆盖社区的社会经济属性。我们发现，超过 2900 万美国人生活在极端野火的巨大潜在风险中，其中大多数是白人和社会经济上有保障的。然而，在这一群体中，有 1200 万社会弱势群体的美国人，野火事件对他们来说可能是毁灭性的。此外，野火脆弱性在种族和族裔之间分布不均，黑人、西班牙裔或美国原住民占多数的普查区受到野火的影响比其他普查区高约 50%。从易发生火灾的景观的社会生态角度出发，可以确定那些应对野火能力不足的地区。
