The Western Klamath Restoration Partnership (WKRP) is creating a path toward collaborative fire management in the Klamath Basin. It arose from a desire by the Karuk Tribe, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, the US Forest Service, area Fire Safe Councils, environmental groups and other community-based stakeholders to explore what collaborative fire management would look like. A hallmark of this eff
ort is the intensive participation by individuals and organizations with diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives about how to shape fire management. Many feel the pain of a long history of devastating wildfire events, mistrust, and failed attempts at working together. We use GIS-based fire modeling, an open and interactive planning process, and facilitation to get past some of these challenges. After multiple stakeholders and numerous ecological and social values were considered, projects are being planned to create a model for how fire can be brought back in a good way to areas where it has long been excluded, instead of through a wildfire at the hottest, driest times. The primary outcome of the WKRP to date is a decision to pursue collaborative management on three project areas within the larger planning area. These projects include not only locations for prescribed fire and fuel treatments, but also a new way of designing, implementing and learning from them. WKRP has adopted the Open Standards Process for Conservation to ensure that all parties are in agreement on the proposed project activities. The Open Standards process has been used around the world over a thousand times in situations where complex, contentious land management issues require a framework for people to identify a way forward. This was achieved by agreeing to Shared Values that all participants strongly supported, rather than focusing immediately on where there was disagreement. These included:
• Sustainable local economies
• Cultural and community vitality – includes food security and balanced human-fire relationship
• Fire-adapted communities
• Restored fire regimes
• Resilient, biodiverse forests, plants and animals
• Healthy river system
By starting with our shared values, we identified common ground to start from. We then looked at direct and indirect threats to these values, and finally agreed to strategies that would turn these threats to opportunities to achieve our values. These strategies included:
• Develop and implement landscape level strategic fuels reduction treatments
• Increase use of fire to restore & maintain Pre-European conditions in a contemporary context
• Increase local restoration capacity
• Create sustainable diverse revenue streams to address all threats and values
• Accelerate development of Fire Adapted Communities
• Integrate food security into forest management actions
• Advocate for and support implementing existing fisheries restoration plans
• Develop integrated, inter-generational education programs and activities that complement our identified strategies
• Develop inclusive partnerships for implementing zones of agreement
Part of our success has been creating just enough structure to function effectively while not overly constricting our ability to find adaptive solutions to problems as they arise. Rather than form a Charter, we agreed to Guiding Principles that define the Way We Work:
1. We are results-oriented.
2. We work toward having beneficial fire operating throughout our landscape.
3. We incorporate cultural values and traditional ecological knowledge into our work.
4. Our activities seek to build our local workforce.
5. We use the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation as our guide to adaptive management and collaboration. Through a series of intensive collaborative workshops beginning in April 2013, the Open Standards process allowed us to come to Zones of Agreement:
1. Creating defensible space around structures and critical infrastructure through manual and prescribed burning fuels reduction treatments.
2. Safe and reliable access and egress routes
3. Treatment along Public/Private boundaries.
4. Fuelbreaks along existing firelines, ridges, and trails
5. Maintaining existing fuels treatments on public and private lands to increase fuelbreak effectiveness
6. Targeted fuel treatments for cultural and ecological resource benefits to protect tribal practices dependent on the use of fire as a land management tool, and to preserve plant and animal species that depend on habitats maintained by frequent fires
