Effectiveness
What does emergency response actually achieve? What would happen if we pursued a different strategy?
“You get what you measure”, but metrics of effectiveness in wildfire and emergency management are often poor or lacking entirely. The real-world effects of our interventions are most often buried inside aggregate figures.
Measuring Suppression
Connecting US Forest Service, Canadian Forest Service, and Fire Operations in Canada’s National Parks.
Emergent Risk Management staff led development of a more rigorous way to ask and answer fundamental questions about managing fire. Common wildfire metrics lump together fires that would have stayed small on their own, fires contained by crews, and fires that would escape despite any response.
This project created a new method to estimate suppression's actual effect, comparing simulated landscape fire risk under alternative management strategies. The demonstration paper applied this approach to a landscape in the Canadian Rockies, and found surprising variation in suppression effectiveness.
The framework treats suppression strategy as something that can be measured and compared, providing managers a way to evaluate alternative response policies before committing to them.