The governor’s Office of Planning and Research on Monday updated its guidance for cities and counties in planning for wildfires. It offers land use strategies for reducing fire risk for buildings and communities. Along with vegetation management, the lengthy report recommends agricultural buffers to create defensible space in areas known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI).
With new housing developments in the WUI, it recommends clustering homes together with larger agricultural buffers than what has been the standard way of broadly dispersing houses.
“The changes we are seeing in the scale and severity of wildfires, combined with decades of expansion of the wildland-urban interface and a century of extensive fuel buildup, demands that we expand our approach,” said Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter.
