Emerging Risks of Wildfires at the Wildland-Urban Interface in Mexico

As more intense and more frequent natural hazards result in human and economic losses, fires, and more specifically wildfires in wildland-urban interface/intermix (WUI) are among the natural hazards that present a substantial, albeit preventable risk of ecological and human disasters. Although wildfires are a largely researched area of study in forest ecology and natural sciences across the globe, with social science and interdisciplinary studies of risk catching up, WUI areas across North, Central and South America that show an increase in wildfire risk are currently under-researched, with the exception of Canada and the US. In this paper, we focus on wildfires in the Mexican WUI, which have historically been seen as a threat to forest ecosystems rather than as a threat to populations. This paper sets out to understand to what extent the under-researched WUI wildfires present risk to WUI populations in Mexico using a mixed methods approach. We perform a Mexico WUI fire diagnostics by drawing on the official datasets, documentation regarding preparedness, mitigation and response to wildfires affecting urban populations, and where information is lacking, we review media news sources regarding the outcomes for populations in the past WUI wildfires in Mexico. We conclude that a substantial proportion of WUI territory in Mexico is at risk from wildfires, potentially causing harm to populations in the future. Thus, more should be done to prepare these populations to respond, and mechanisms for fire risk mitigation, wildfire adaptation and recovery from fire effects should be developed.