We know how to protect homes from wildfires. Why don’t more people do it?

When Francois Rossouw saw that the summer of 2023 was shaping up to be a dry season in the Northwest Territories, he took steps to protect his home.

Rossouw lives off-grid in the boreal forest, about 30 kilometres outside Yellowknife. Having previously worked in forestry and wildfire logistics, he was no stranger to FireSmart — a program that offers recommendations on how to reduce wildfire risk to homes and communities.

That spring, Rossouw cleared dead wood from around his house. Although it’s not a key part of the FireSmart guidelines, he set up a sprinkler system on his property. He also installed a fire-resistant metal roof, which was only completed about a week before a wildfire raged toward his home, triggering a three-week evacuation.

The fire ultimately came within about 15 kilometres of Rossouw’s property. Even now, though, he doesn’t want to get rid of the spruce trees that envelop his home. FireSmart recommends removing combustible material within 1.5 metres of a building and removing or replacing flammable vegetation within 10 metres. But Rossouw worries that eliminating vegetation would dry out the ground, making it more prone to burn. His home is also sandwiched between a lake and a highway, so he depends on the forest for privacy in some spots.

“If I was to FireSmart to their measurements, I would have no trees on my property,” he said. “Well, what’s the point of living here?”

The FireSmart program took shape in Alberta in the early 1990s. Concerned about fires in the wildland-urban interface, a handful of provincial and national agencies and organizations formed Partners in Protection, a coalition aimed at reducing losses through awareness and education. In 1999, the group put out the first of many FireSmart manuals, outlining practical steps individuals and communities can take to reduce wildfire risk.

Despite the increasing frequency and intensity of Canadian wildfires in the decades since, Rossouw isn’t alone in his reluctance to apply some of FireSmart’s guidelines. While there is growing awareness of the need to adapt to increasingly destructive, climate-fuelled blazes, implementation of the program remains low.

“The uptake has not been huge,” Alan Westhaver, a wildfire mitigation consultant who helped develop the FireSmart program, said.

In British Columbia, FireSmart offers free home assessments, which provide tailored recommendations on reducing wildfire risk. Once a homeowner completes the recommended work and a follow-up assessment, the home is certified as FireSmart. Out of 7,428 assessments completed throughout B.C. since 2021, only 116 homes have been certified, according to Hannah Swift, chair of the FireSmart BC committee.

“It’s a really high standard, so it’s hard to get,” she said. But even the number of assessments completed represents a drop in the bucket compared to the number of homes province-wide.

There are places where FireSmart has seen success. Logan Lake, B.C., became the country’s first FireSmart community in 2013, and the work to manage fuels in the surrounding forest, implement FireSmart practices around houses and install rooftop sprinklers helped save the town from a wildfire in 2021. Interest is also growing: in Vernon, B.C., residents of a large strata complex recently spent $225,000 to remove 670 metres of flammable cedar hedges — an “unheard of” level of investment and work, according to Wes Brassard, the city’s FireSmart coordinator.

Considering the scale of the wildfire threat, however, experts say implementation is far from where it needs to be.

Nationwide, about 12 per cent of the population lives in the wildland-urban interface, where communities face the risk of wildfire because of their proximity to forests, according to a 2021 study. That amounts to more than four million people. And as Canada scrambles to address a nationwide housing crisis, millions of new homes are planned for wildfire-prone areas, the Canadian Climate Institute recently reported.

“We are, in my view, behind the curve in terms of getting homes and communities ready for fire,” Eric Kennedy, associate professor of disaster and emergency management at York University, said.

Investigating problems. Exploring solutions

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Investigating problems. Exploring solutions

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Research on wildfire mitigation has long focused on how and why things burn, but implementation is a social science issue. Some researchers are moving toward examining human factors that influence why we act to reduce the risks — or not. Scaling up, they say, will require addressing common barriers, accounting for the ways people make decisions and adjusting solutions to different local contexts.

To create fire-adapted communities, experts say, the public needs to better understand how to live with fire, but fire professionals also need to hone their skills in working with people.

An expensive undertaking

The FireSmart program was modelled after Firewise, a similar program in the United States. It also drew on research going back to the 1970s showing how a building’s characteristics and its surroundings affect its chances of surviving a blaze.

FireSmart guidelines for homeowners are largely built around the concept of the home ignition zone, an area within 30 metres of a building. The zone is made up of three concentric priority areas, each with its own batch of recommendations intended to address a specific aspect of fire risk.

Within the first 1.5 metres, the goal is to reduce the likelihood that embers will cause ignition. That might mean choosing non-combustible building materials, keeping the roof and gutters clear of debris and clearing vegetation around the house. Further away from the structure, recommendations focus on managing the spread of flames and the intensity of radiant heat by, say, using fire-resistant landscaping and pruning evergreen trees.

Evidence suggests FireSmart recommendations can make a meaningful difference. After the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alta., Westhaver investigated why some homes survived in otherwise charred neighbourhoods. Unharmed homes generally exhibited FireSmart attributes, he found, while those that burned often did not.

In every fire, Westhaver said, there’s a damage-free building that ends up labelled a “miracle house.” But, he said, “Every time you look at one of those situations, it’s not luck and it’s not random. That home was not easily ignited.”

According to Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Métis fire scientist and policy advisor with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, FireSmart recommendations are grounded in solid science. The issue has always been implementation.

“How do we get homeowners to actually do these things that are being recommended?” she said. There’s also the question of how to handle renters, and others who have little ability or incentive to invest in protecting their homes. In Indigenous communities, Christianson said, many people live in homes owned and managed by the Indigenous government.

While a slew of factors influence adoption, by far the most common barrier identified by Christianson and others is financial.

In an unpublished analysis from 2018, Christianson and her colleagues estimated that retrofitting a 186-square-metre (or 2,000-square-foot) home in the Edmonton area to FireSmart standards would cost between $37,000 and $54,000. That price has likely since increased, she said. Last year, a U.S.-based non-profit estimated that retrofitting a similar-sized home in California would cost between US$2,000 (for simple tasks, like installing a thin sheet of metal where a deck meets a wall) and US$100,000 (for a full renovation using fire-resistant materials and components).

According to Robert Gray, a fire ecologist in British Columbia, census data suggests the median age in many rural B.C. communities is in the high 50s to low 60s, and the median household income is often less than $80,000 a year.

“You’re asking people who physically can’t do the work, on a fixed income, to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”

While some FireSmart recommendations require minimal effort and investment, depending on the situation, these steps alone may not be enough, Christianson said. 

The financial incentives available only help offset a small part of the cost. In B.C., certain communities provide rebates, often set around $1,000, for recommended FireSmart measures. Some insurance providers also offer discounts to clients with FireSmart-certified homes or in FireSmart-recognized neighbourhoods, but these can be difficult to access.

When Christianson looked into applying for a discount, she found she would have had to make tens of thousands of dollars worth of changes to her home. Meanwhile, her insurance provider would only have shaved a few hundred dollars off her annual premium.

Clouded judgement gets in the way, sometimes

FireSmart is not the only disaster mitigation program that has struggled to take off. Whether the hazard is fire or flooding, getting people to protect their properties is a real challenge, Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, said.

More than 30 communities in Canada provide homeowners with incentives to install devices that prevent basement flooding. In virtually every case, McGillivray said, uptake is dismal, even when the money provided will entirely pay for the work.

“It’s very puzzling,” he said. “You can theorize until you’re blue in the face, but it’s a pretty complicated issue. You’re getting into human nature, basically.”

McGillivray and his colleagues are trying to figure out what an ideal incentive program for mitigating basement flooding would look like by reviewing past and current programs to determine what has helped and hindered uptake. Cognitive biases are known to cloud people’s judgement when it comes to preparing for disasters — we tend to focus on the near term when weighing costs, for instance, and follow the herd in our decision-making. Although it’s still too early to say what a program designed for both human and logistical considerations would look like, McGillivray said, the findings will likely be transferrable to wildfire.

Decision-making around wildfire mitigation is not always straightforward.

When Tara McGee started studying wildfire social science in Canada in the early 2000s, the line of thinking was that experiencing wildfire once would lead people to implement FireSmart recommendations. But that’s not always what happens, the professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta said.

After a fire, some people think they are unlikely to experience another in the near future. Others develop doubts about the effectiveness of mitigation measures.

Recent history shows that communities devastated by wildfire do not necessarily build back to be more fire resilient. Last year, Lytton, B.C., abandoned its plans to rebuild in line with FireSmart guidelines, citing the prohibitive cost of mitigation measures. In Fort McMurray, too, FireSmart implementation continues to be patchy. According to a 2022 survey, roughly 80 per cent of residents had cleaned up dead vegetation close to their homes, but only 19 per cent were willing to replace siding with fire-resistant material.

Part of the problem may be a lack of public understanding of how homes ignite, said Magda Zachara, FireSmart Canada’s program manager. Many think homes burn because of an encroaching wall of flames, she said, and that nothing they do can stop something so powerful. But in most cases, wind-blown embers are the source of ignition.

“Once people have that knowledge and understanding, then the mitigation recommendations we make start to make more sense,” she said. 

Responding to the local context can improve uptake

Mitigation recommendations may also need to be better aligned with the way people think about managing risk, according to Travis Paveglio, professor of natural resource sociology at the University of Idaho.

Paveglio and his colleagues have studied wildfire mitigation in communities throughout the western United States, finding that differences in social characteristics — how people work together, who they trust and how they understand the role of fire in the area — influence how communities approach adaptation.

One of the most robust findings in wildfire social science, Paveglio said, is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Drawing on at least 20 years of case studies, Paveglio and his colleagues have come up with five broad categories of community types, or “archetypes,” with distinct social contexts. In each archetype, certain approaches to mitigation are more likely to be adopted than others. 

For instance, communities with more formal, suburban structures tend to be inhabited by professionals who generally trust government. Residents are likely to support education programs or regulatory approaches to mitigation. In contrast, residents in rural, resource-dependent communities tend to be highly knowledgeable about wildfires, and may not respond well to being told what to do. In these communities, informal, grassroots methods might be most promising.

In the U.S., the Firewise program tends to resonate more with some community archetypes than others, Paveglio said. That may be true for FireSmart too: while the program is intended to be flexible and community-driven, in the past, it has often relied on simply giving people information on best practices without considering specific communities’ context, according to Christianson. In some places, she said, the approach fits in well with local values, while in others, the recommendations are not as doable. 

The FireSmart team is trying to expand the program’s appeal, particularly in Indigenous communities. Last year, FireSmart released an educational graphic tailored to Indigenous and northern communities. Since 2022, FireSmart BC and the First Nations’ Emergency Services Society of British Columbia have also run an Indigenous outreach alliance, where FireSmart coordinators working for First Nations can share feedback on the program and suggest adjustments to better align with their communities’ needs and values.

The situation is improving. In B.C., the number of people employed to deliver the program locally has nearly doubled in the past year. 

While many communities are doing good work, Christianson thinks there is still a need for more fire experts who understand their local context and are trained to work intensively with people toward adaptation. 

That, she said, is the hard work that has yet to happen at scale.