Edible fire buffers: mitigation of wildfire with multifunctional landscapes

Abstract

Wildfires ravage lands in seasonally-dry regions, imposing high costs on infrastructure maintenance and human habitation at the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Current fire mitigation approaches present upfront costs with uncertain long-term payoffs. Instead, we show that a simple landscape intervention on human-managed wildlands - buffers of a low-flammability crop species such as banana irrigated using recycled water - can mitigate wildfires, produce food profitably, and provide additional ecosystem services. Recreating a recent, major fire in simulation, we find that a medium-sized banana buffer decreases fireline intensity by 96%, similar to prescribed burns and mechanical thinning combined, and delays the fire by 316 minutes, enabling safe and effective firefighting. We find that under climate change, despite worsened fires, banana buffers will still have a protective effect. We also find that banana buffers with average yield could produce a profit of $56k USD/hectare through fruit sales, in addition to fire mitigation and other benefits.