Preparing ... for what? Developing multi-dimensional measures of community wildfire preparedness for researchers, practitioners and households

In an effort to reduce wildfire risk to community members, researchers and practitioners have sought to identify the factors that are most effective in motivating community members to engage in preparatory behaviours. Quantitative research in this area has been hampered, however, by a lack of consistency in, and validation of household wildfire preparedness assessments. Consequences have included a difficulty in comparing results across quantitative studies, a poor collective understanding of how existing preparedness assessments were developed and an inability to ascertain how specific preparedness actions are tied to householders’ responses to wildfire. We propose to resolve these issues by (1) presenting a definition of wildfire preparedness for adoption as the standard in quantitative studies, (2) developing a typology of wildfire preparedness that distinguishes between household wildfire goals (i.e. safe evacuation, effective active defence and improving the fire resistance of a property in the absence of an active defender), (3) constructing two new standardised measures of preparedness and (4) undertaking a community survey to investigate the validity of the measures. The development of the new measures will facilitate the standardisation of future research into wildfire preparedness, while differentiating between types of preparedness, and is expected to yield practical benefits.