The International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), the Pau Costa Foundation (PCF), and the Association for Fire Ecology (AFE) organize the Partner Webinar Series, a monthly series of webinars to bring together diverse voices from the global wildland fire community. If you would like to suggest a topic or speaker for this series, please contact us.

Upcoming webinars

Past Webinars

Reflections from 20 years Examining the Social Dynamics of Fire Management

Presented by Sarah McCaffrey, PhD, Retired Research Social Scientist

Sarah McCaffrey, PhD, retired in 2022 after 20 years as a fire social scientist with the US Forest Service where her research focused on understanding the social dynamics of fire management.  This included research projects that examined the role of risk perception and risk attitudes, social acceptability of prescribed fire, homeowner mitigation decisions, evacuation decision making, risk communication, and agency-community interactions during fires.  Since retirement she has been involved with a number of research and practitioner efforts to improve future fire outcomes including as an adviser to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative and Board member for Fire Adapted Colorado.  She received her PhD in 2002 from the University of California at Berkeley where her dissertation examined Incline Village, Nevada homeowner views and actions in relation to defensible space and fuels management.

Integrating Public Health into Forest and Fire Management

Presented by Savannah M D’Evelyn, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Washington

Increasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. Climate change and more than a century of fire exclusion and wildfire suppression have led to contemporary wildfires with more severe environmental impacts and human smoke exposure. Wildfires increase smoke exposure for broad swaths of the US population, though outdoor workers and socially disadvantaged groups with limited adaptive capacity can be disproportionally exposed. Scientists, planners, foresters and fire managers, fire safety, air quality, and public health practitioners must collaboratively work together to protect both human and forest health.

Dr. Savannah D’Evelyn is an environmental health scientist and bio-social scientist with expertise in environmental toxicology, community-based participatory research (CBPR), air pollution exposure, and implementation science. Her work centers on understanding the impacts of climate change on communities through the research themes of community action, air pollution exposure, and climate adaptation. Dr. D’Evelyn’s work on wildfire smoke at the University of Washington utilizes interdisciplinary collaborative approaches to work across forestry, climate, air quality, and health disciplines to move toward both fire- and smoke-ready communities. In her role as an environmental consultant for the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, Dr. D’Evelyn is working to improve access to air quality data by expanding monitoring networks across Colorado schools.

Gender and Wildfires

How gender equity enhances our capacity to cope with wildfires?

Prof. Dr. Christine Eriksen, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland

That disasters are gendered social experiences is by now a well-established fact among disaster researchers. What is not always so clear is how gendered dimensions of disasters play out before, during and after an event, such as a catastrophic wildfire. In this talk, I use insights from research with wildland firefighters and residents living in fire-prone areas in Australia and North America to unpack some of the entrenched gendered norms and structural biases that continue to inhibit societal capacity to cope with wildfires.

Analyzing women´s performance in wildfire research

Prof. Elsa Pastor, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech and research scientist at the Center for Technological Risk Studies at UPC

Wildfire management and research exhibit significant gender disparities. Women are underrepresented in leadership roles in fire agencies, fire industry, and wildfire research, which largely falls within STEM disciplines. While past studies have generally highlighted this inequality, no comprehensive analysis quantifying the disparity, especially within wildfire research, has been conducted until now. In this talk, I present a performance analysis of women in wildfire research. Through literature and bibliometric surveys, I assess the landscape of wildfire researchers, their scholarly outputs and the impact of women over a 50-year period, spanning various regions and subject areas. Additionally, I identify and scrutinize key roles in wildfire science in terms of women’s representation and leadership.

Introduction to Partner Webinar Series

Panel of Presidents

Miriam Piqué, Pau Costa Foundation President, Head of the Multifunctional Forest Management Program, CTFC

Paul Hessburg, AFE President, Senior Research Ecologist, Pacific Research Station, USDA Forest Service

Joaquin Ramirez, IAWF President, CTO. Technosylva Inc. and Professor, University of Leon

 This webinar provides an overview of each organization and discusses important wildland fire issues, future activities and goals, and ways the organizations can support each other.