Online discussions from a foresight panel: Wildland fire management futures

This data publication contains transcripts from an expert foresight panel discussing the future of wildland fire management in a series of structured, text-based, asynchronous online discussions. Panelists included seven leading academic and professional futurists plus two wildfire professionals. This expert foresight panel discussed the potential for high-impact future developments in wildland fire management, the likelihood and impact of these developments, and policies that encourage positive developments in wildland fire management. These discussions are included here as twenty-seven documents, each devoted to a single topic, grouped in three rounds of week-long correspondence between panel members from June through December of 2013. Round one consisted of discussions on the following topics: climate change, monitoring, serious games, bioengineering, new firefighting technologies, insurance, risk assessment, economic and political context, value change, fire-resistant designs and materials, public education and engagement, and policy tools. The second round of discussions required the panelists to react to three mini-scenarios, each scenario described a wide range of plausible social, economic, and technological contexts for fire management in the future. The third round included four discussion threads based on the ideas and concepts examined during the first two rounds of discussion.
The purpose of convening an expert foresight panel to discuss wildland fire management was to anticipate and discuss present and future developments in wildland fire management, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of current national fire policy, and to anticipate the future trajectory of national fire policy in light of recent developments in several important areas related to wildland fire management.
Original metadata date was 6/14/2016. Minor metadata updates on 12/19/2016.