Melissa La Roche

Project Description:

Canada has been profoundly shaped by wildfire. Over the past five years, almost fifteen million hectares have burned – twice the size of the province of New Brunswick – with grave consequences for communities at the wildland urban interface. During this time, significant knowledge has been produced in the natural sciences and engineering about how to protect communities from wildfire. There is comparatively little understanding, however, of the social and behavioural dimensions of this challenge. In other words, why is it that – despite knowing how, technologically speaking, to protect homes from wildfire – adoption rates of these techniques and technologies remain low? There has been extensive research on various barriers to preparedness within Canada and around the world. For example, aspects like land tenure, wildfire experience, education, social support, community connectedness, and risk perception all have been hypothesized to play a role. However, limited work has been done systematically reviewing, comparing, and testing these barriers against each other. This project is designed to leverage existing social science research to translate existing small-scale, inductive research into actionable prospective interventions. At present, the literature contains many small-scale case studies, often with somewhat contradictory claims about the effectiveness of each hypothesis. Moreover, because the studies range so radically in location, sample size, and measurement instruments, it’s difficult to know which barriers are have the potential to be most effective for interventions aimed at reducing the tragic consequences of wildfires. By the end of this project, we will have a systematic account of all research done on barriers to preparedness.

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The Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) - Undergraduate enables our students to meaningfully engage in research projects supervised by LA&PS faculty members. Find out more about DARE.