Smoke Ready Communities Local Planning Framework
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This presentation shares a framework that participants may consider for taking a collaborative approach to developing a local wildland fire smoke public health response plan.
Wildland fire smoke is associated with a range of adverse health impacts. Actions to mitigate health impacts of exposure to wildland fire smoke can be implemented across scales, including individual, organizational, group, community, state, region, and national levels. Public health theory and evidence demonstrate when efforts on multiple levels are combined, positive outcomes are more likely to be observed and sustained because strategies implemented at one scale can reinforce strategies implemented at other scales.
At the community level, a public health response to wildland fire smoke is needed because adverse health impacts related to smoke exposure have population level health impacts. The increasing frequency of large-scale wildfires and use of fire in land management activities underscore the need for establishing public health response plans for future smoke events. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that in addressing complex social issues, similar to the public health issue of wildland fire smoke exposure, an effective and positive collaborative approach to public health response planning is associated with improved outcomes.
The primary mechanism for improved outcomes associated with a collaborative approach to addressing complex issues is the series of repeated interactions that occur with effective collaboration. Through these repeated interactions stakeholders develop and strengthen relationships, learn about the issue and each other, and can share different types of resources - all of which reflect increases in dimensions of community capacity. Increased community capacity in the context of wildland fire smoke and public health is a precursor of increased community resilience to these environmental events. A high resilience to wildland fire smoke events means that communities and individuals in those communities take action to reduce their exposure and continue to function as appropriate, and learn from each smoke event to improve their response to the next smoke event- effectively mitigating the public health impacts observed in their community.