Creating fire-adapted landscapes for both people and nature: could we protect all western US communities from wildfires and facilitate restoring fire to wildlands within a decade?

Abstract Wildfires burned hundreds of communities in the 11 western US states (11WS) over the last two decades, and a federal program, Confronting the Wildfire Crisis, is using fuel-reduction treatments (FRTs) over 7–9 million ha in 10 years to reduce exposure of communities to fires originating in distant wildlands. But, could a landscape system of fire-resistant land-uses and FRTs near communities better protect them all? If possible, this could also facilitate wildfire restoration in wildlands, both goals of Fire-Adapted Communities. I used GIS to estimate fire rates from 2000–2021 in 58 land covers to identify potential fire-resistant land uses, then used rates to place them into five categories from Safest to Very Dangerous. I added buffers of 100, 850, 2500, and 5000 m, representing different fire threats, to maps of 4484 communities in the 11WS, then measured Safeness categories in them and their buffers. A surprising 34%–39% of area inside communities and 53% in their outermost buffer were dangerous land uses. When 2000–2021 fires burned into 499 communities, 95% of burned area was in wildland vegetation, 88% was in dangerous, only 6% in safe land uses, validating these categories. For landscape fire protection, agencies/communities could: (1) move FRTs now in distant wildlands into dangerous land uses and wildland vegetation inside the outer buffer of communities, where FRTs can reduce fire intensity and ember and smoke production, (2) replace dangerous internal land uses with safer uses, (3) retain safer uses internally and in buffers, and (4) link them with added safe uses or a constructed barrier, averaging as little as ∼25 m wide by 12–15 km long (< 1% of the mean area of communities + buffers), across dangerous land uses externally. If funding was refocused, this could enable all communities in the 11WS to substantially develop fire-adapted landscapes for both people and nature within about a decade.