A Congressional directive to develop a comprehensive national wildland fire and restoration strategy spurred the development of a plan entitled A Collaborative Approach for Reducing Wildland Fire Risks to Communities and the Environment 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy Implementation Plan (the implementation plan). This plan was designed to reduce the risk of wildfire to communities in the wildland urban interface and the environment through governmental collaboration across all levels. The need for this strategy arose from:
A high level of growth in the wildland urban interface that is placing more citizens and property at-risk of wildland fire.
Increasing ecosystem health problems across the landscape.
An awareness that many of the past century’s traditional approaches to land management, the development of unnaturally dense, diseased or dying forests, and treatment of wildland fire have contributed to more severe wildland fires and created widespread threats to communities and ecosystems.
The implementation plan established a collaborative, performance-based framework for achieving these goals and actions with performance measures and tasks to identify key benchmarks and track progress over time. It also provided tools to deliver national goals at the local level in an ecologically, socially, and economically appropriate manner. This implementation plan was endorsed by the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior, the Western Governors’ Association, National Association of State Foresters, National Association of Counties, and the Intertribal Timber Council in 2001.
The implementation plan is available online at:
http://www.westgov.org/wga/initiatives/fire/implem_plan.pdf