|
Last week we attended the Wildland Urban Fire Summit (WUFS) in Los Lunas, New Mexico, for the latest installment of an annual conference series that focuses on developments in the wildland urban interface.
This year's WUFS prominently featured discussion of wildfire insurance concerns. Increasing wildfire occurrence and severity have driven up insurance costs, pricing some homeowners out of insurance policies and, in some cases, leading insurance providers to abandon certain markets entirely. To address concerns by providers that certain markets have become uninsurable due to risk, and by homeowners that insurance options in wildfire-prone communities are increasingly unaffordable or unavailable, two organizations, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), have developed programs to minimize risk and preserve insurability.
New Mexico is the most recent state to have adopted the IBHS standards for home wildfire hardening, known as the Wildfire Prepared Home standard. IBHS's recommendations aim to address disparities in the wildland fire insurance environment by providing a baseline that, if met and maintained by homeowners, ensures a minimum acceptable standard that lowers wildfire risk and insurance costs. Despite the advertised benefits of adopting IBHS standards, only four states (California, Nevada, Oregon, and New Mexico) have yet done so.
That may be due in part to the more accessible FireWise approach developed by the NFPA. FireWise programs, which receive certification from the NFPA when standards are met, can be started by neighborhoods and Homeowners Associations or even adopted by municipal authorities, such as a county or fire district. FireWise focuses on mitigation adoption through community engagement, establishing and maintaining a coalition of community stakeholders and individuals who participate in educational activities and fuel reduction around homes and communal areas. Wildfire Alliance offers FireWise consultation and implementation services to members and other stakeholders. For more information, click here.
Wildfire Alliance Executive Director Luis Cordova, who represented Wildfire Alliance at this year's WUFS, said that FireWise and IBHS don't necessarily need to compete for adoption, but instead represent different tiers of hardening efforts. "The FireWise standard is an important community-based approach to elevate the level of mitigation across an entire neighborhood, which will help stabilize costs both for homeowners and providers." He said, adding that "IBHS standards go a step further, providing a path for individual homeowners to potentially lower their wildfire risk and insurance costs by implementing stricter, more uniform mitigation efforts that are a known quantity to insurance providers."
WUFS featured an insurance-focused panel that mentioned collaboration between the IBHS and the NFPA to develop comprehensive recommendations for standards, especially for neighborhoods and community adoption. This and other partnerships represent a trend toward homogenization in the wildfire insurance policy landscape, as government, community, nonprofit, and business partners work to establish consensus around necessary mitigation and acceptable risk to keep insurance available to homeowners.
A similar annual event, the Arizona Wildland Urban Interface Summit, will take place this year from October 28-30 in Prescott, AZ. The Summit will focus on mitigation strategies, including leveraging emerging technologies and fuel treatment approaches in mitigation efforts.
| 
