Wildfires pose unique risks and challenges in the wildland urban interface (WUI), defined as the geography where houses either intermingle with, or are in proximity to, wildland vegetation. In the WUI, wildfires are more frequently ignited by humans, and fire can be catastrophic due to 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, where they exist at all.

We are working convergently with scientists in public policy, fire science, climate science, and ecology alongside stakeholders in fire management and policy to create and interpret actionable science aimed at increasing the resilience of populations living in and near the WUI to wildfire. We do this by applying future projections of fire weather, land use, and population in combination with studies of current wildfire patterns and wildfire readiness strategies in the WUI. The first stage of this research is to develop projections of exposure to extreme fire weather in the WUI. To develop fire weather projections, we employ thirteen bias-corrected simulations produced for the NA-CORDEX leveraging RCP8.5 emission scenario simulations for the future projections. We derive future WUI footprints and WUI populations from projections of land use change and population change under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios from the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), SSP3 and SSP5. By combining the projections of WUI footprint, population, and fire weather extremes, we examine the future potential population exposure to extreme fire weather within the WUI under a high risk scenario. Preliminary results show a higher frequency of both extreme fire weather risk and exposure within WUI populations.