The Architecture of Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs)

When it comes to protecting your community from wildfire, preparing for and managing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) can feel overwhelming. It can be daunting to build a CWPP that accurately reflects the priority of your community, assesses the magnitude of risk, and lays out a plan for all your distinct community partners to collaborate on. Meanwhile, organizations including the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, US Forest Service, and International Fire Chiefs Association have laid out similar and sometimes even conflicting requirements for building a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) – their discrepancies may make the process feel oftentimes disparate. Regardless of the organization, Vibrant Planet can help you plainly understand the nuances of different CWPP requirements, and organize your community’s collaborative needs into a single, coherent plan. 

In this article, we’ll explore the distinct requirements of each agency, and share how our platform can help satisfy them. Using Vibrant Planet to build your CWPP, you’ll not only arm your Collaborative with a dynamic strategy to reduce wildfire risk, but also unlock the grant funding you need to implement the work.   

Healthy Forest Restoration Act CWPP Requirements 

The Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) requires a CWPP to focus on:  

1. Collaboration between local and state government representatives, in consultation with federal agencies and other interested parties
2. Prioritized fuel reduction treatments and recommendations to reduce structural ignitability
3. Consideration of the full range of forest management tools

US Forest Service CWPP Requirements

The US Forest Service also has specific requirements for CWPPs, which align closely with HFRA guidelines:

1. Collaboration between multiple stakeholder
2. Prioritization of fuel reduction treatments
3. Addressing structural ignitability 

International Association of Fire Chiefs CWPP Requirements

The International Fire Chiefs Association (IAFC) has its own set of CWPP requirements, which include:

1. Establishing a community base map
2. Developing a community risk assessment
3. Establishing community hazard reduction priorities
4. Finalizing the CWPP 

Build a CWPP to satisfy HFRA, USFS, and IAFC requirements 

Each organization’s goals coalesce around three main themes: collaborate, identify risk and hazard, and address structural ignitability. Vibrant Planet helps you build a CWPP around these pillars, so that you are prepared to comply with any organization. Let’s take a deeper dive into how our platform tools and models will prepare you: 

Convening Decision-Makers and Stakeholders (Required by HFRA, IAFC, and US Forest Service)

With built-in fine-scale vegetation, fire hazard, and risk modeling data, our platform can be used to easily establish a common operating picture for you and your partners to build a plan on top of. Community members, agencies, and stakeholders can join your digital account, view the landscape, and see how risk opportunities may adjust (pictured below). For example, different organizations may want to see how water infrastructure can be best preserved, while others may want to understand risk around historical community sites.  

Establishing a Community Base Map (Required by IAFC)

We use machine learning algorithms to harmonize dozens of public datasets (including NAIP, lidar, and satellite imagery) with custom local data (such as local ingress/egress routes) to build a thorough and current view of your landscape. Our platform updates data frequently, so you always have a detailed, up-to-date view of your landscape vegetation, topography, and any values-at-risk. 

Developing a Community Risk Assessment (Required by HFRA, IAFC, US Forest Service)

‍Our platform incorporates best-in-class hazard modeling powered by Pyrologix, a Vibrant Planet Company, so you can clearly understand where the highest fire probability and intensity exists across your landscape. From here, you’ll be able to understand deeper risk metrics and variants, including structure exposure scores. This can be a helpful informant for assessing the vulnerability of structures to ignition (pictured below), which is an important element of a Community Risk Assessment. 

Establishing Community Hazard Reduction Priorities (Required by HFRA, IAFC, US Forest Service) 

• Each partner can use the platform and set weighted priorities based on their objectives. This provides a common language and shared framework for establishing priorities. 
• These weighted objectives, as well as community hazard, influences how the platform generates objective project recommendations 

Developing an Action Plan and Assessment Strategy (Required HFRA, IAFC, US Forest Service) 

‍We integrate our community risk assessment into a plan of prioritized projects that can be iterated on until you’ve reached consensus with your partners. The plan includes suggested treatments and estimated co-benefits to landscape features. 

Finalizing the CWPP (Required by IAFC)

After you’ve built your prioritized plans, Vibrant Plans generates a draft CWPP on a public digital domain for easy review by key stakeholders, community members, and the general public. 

From start to finish, Vibrant Planet’s tools and industry-leading models can help you analyze and mitigate risk and coalesce and prioritize community needs all in one place. By using Vibrant Planet's tools and industry-leading models, you and your partners can efficiently develop digital, dynamic CWPPs that satisfy requirements across multiple regulatory frameworks and can be adapted as risk changes. 

Ready to start building your own CWPP? Reach out to our team to learn about the products we're building and how they can help your community create a comprehensive, compliant wildfire protection plan.