Morpho: Sustainable community fuel breaks for social-ecological resilience to northern wildfires

Increasing wildfire risk associated with climate change is creating strong pressures on northern communities to manage fuels to protect people, infrastructure, and critical wildlife habitat or protected areas. Strategies to resist damage from wildfires in the boreal forest are considerably enhanced by adaptation efforts to reduce fuel loads in fuel breaks, often constructed through forest harvest or thinning on natural lands around communities. However, maintaining effective fuel breaks requires ongoing treatment and often creates features that compromise the ecosystem services the forest provides to local communities. As an alternative, directing forest succession following fuel treatments can convert forest stands to vegetation structures that simultaneously reduce wildfire risk while supporting multiple community benefits. This win:win situation is ecologically and socially plausible but requires investment in knowledge sharing to support local capacity and innovation. This synthesis project brings together northern experts from diverse knowledge systems to envision and assess opportunities to develop fuel reduction treatments that direct ecological outcomes towards sustainable social-ecological benefits in boreal forests. Through knowledge sharing and assessment of alternative management strategies, this cross-sectoral project will support increased engagement with innovative approaches to fuel management that sustain community resilience to wildfire in the changing climate of the North.