The wildland urban interface (WUI), defined as the geography where houses either intermingle or sit within a certain distance of wildland vegetation, poses challenges related to wildfire. In the WUI, wildfires are more frequently ignited by humans, and fire can be catastrophic given the adjacency to infrastructure and human lives. More people live in the WUI now than ever, but most are unprepared to live with fire. Current policies aimed at increasing resilience to wildfire, such as home hardening and fire readiness, are patchwork and variable, if they exist at all.

As part of a convergent science project addressing the future risk of wildfire under climate change, we aim to merge understanding of climate change, population growth, and public policy in the WUI to create actionable science to increase the resilience of the WUI to wildfire. We do this by applying projections of fire weather, land use, and population in combination with studies of current wildfire readiness strategies in the WUI. To project fire weather, we employ thirteen bias-corrected simulations produced for the North American component of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (NA-CORDEX) leveraging RCP8.5 emission scenario simulations for the future projections. To project the WUI footprint and WUI populations, we use projections of land use change and population change. By combining the projections of WUI footprint, fire weather extremes, and population, we can examine the future potential population exposure to extreme fire weather within the WUI under a high risk scenario. We are working convergently with scientists in public policy, fire science, climate science, and ecology alongside stakeholders in fire management and policy to create policy scenarios for future WUI and interpret the results into actionable science for our stakeholders.