A Pilot Wildfire Risk Assessment for California
The pilot effort to assess risk to certain highly valued resources and assets is an extension of the California All-Lands Hazard Assessment, a project funded by the USDA Forest Service that produced fuel and wildfire hazard information for the year 2020. Since that time, the wildfire hazard data has been updated to reflectthe historic wildfire events of 2020 that impacted millions of acres across the state.
As a pilot assessment, the set of Highly Valued Resources and Assets (HVRA) was limited to housing, critical infrastructure, and surface drinking water — those most commonly identified HVRA for wildfire risk assessments and generally most representative of risk to communities. These HVRA were identified at the outset of the project as a baseline assessment of wildfire risk that can be expanded with a larger set of HVRA as additional funding and projects are identified. In February 2022, a small group of interagency stakeholders met virtually to review and edit HVRA characterization inputs needed to calculate wildfire risk. Their task was to review a preliminary set of Response Functions that characterized each HVRA’s response to fires of different intensity levels, to assign Relative Importance values which establish the ranking of the primary HVRA relative to each other, and agree on a common set of inputs needed to calculate wildfire effects analyses described in this report.
