Addressing wildfire resilience through comprehensive county-level plan effectiveness in California

Wildfires exacerbated by climate change represent a growing planning and policy challenge worldwide. California, with its increasing wildfire risk and local planning complexity, serves as a valuable case offering insights for regions facing similar risks. This study examines plan effectiveness, which measures the conformance of planning documents to policy objectives, to identify unaddressed policy objectives in building wildfire resilience. Using quantified plan analyses, we assess 58 California counties’ plan effectiveness of three primary local planning instruments: General Plan, Hazard Mitigation Plan, and Community Wildfire Protection Plan. We further examine how resilience and social vulnerability are addressed in three planning instruments, comparing them to the Fire Adapted Community and Wildfire Social Vulnerability frameworks. Lastly, we run regression analyses to explore correlations between factors like social vulnerability and wildfire risk, and wildfire plan effectiveness. Results reveal that wildfire mitigation objectives such as recovery planning and social vulnerability are often overlooked, highlighting the need for improving wildfire planning policies, guidelines, and their alignment with wildfire resilience and social vulnerability frameworks. Our findings provide insights into blind spots and opportunities to strengthen current planning tools to build wildfire resilience for California and serve as a reference for wildfire planning and policymaking in other regions. • Identify overlooked wildfire management themes via plan effectiveness assessment. • Reveal a weak alignment between wildfire resilience frameworks and urban policies. • Increase policymakers' awareness of post-fire recovery and social vulnerability. • Provides insights to strengthen policies and planning tools in managing wildfires. • Provide sustainable wildfire-resilient suggestions for regions with fire concerns.