by Shaanth Nanguneri, Oregon Capital Chronicle
May 18, 2026
More than 400 mostly small communities throughout the Northwest, such as Cave Junction, Glendale and La Pine in southern and central Oregon, are at greater risk of suffering from wildfires and their impacts than previously thought when socioeconomic conditions are factored into risk assessments, new research finds.
Researchers from Oregon State University and The Nature Conservancy, with funding from the U.S. Forest Service, conducted a review of wildfire risks in more than 1,000 communities in the region, and applied a social vulnerability index to also account for factors such as household demographics, neighborhood structural density, housing types and local transportation.
Nearly half the communities, 459, were shown to be at greater wildfire risk than previously thought. For 541 communities, risk levels declined when socioeconomic factors were considered, indicating public dollars might be better served assisting low-income communities with wildfire prevention than more affluent ones, the researchers suggested.
The findings were published in April in the peer-reviewed Environmental Research Letters journal.
“Communities experiencing less social vulnerability often have the capacity and resources needed to apply for and make use of publicly funded mitigation,” said Andy McEvoy, a professor at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, in a May news release. “The many communities across the Northwest that are experiencing high social vulnerability have less capacity and fewer resources – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t facing the same risk, or even greater.”
Another 2024 research paper from Oregon State University notes that a lack of investment in prevention and mitigation led to more fire impacts in vulnerable communities.
The researchers also found that communities scoring high on social vulnerability with high wildfire hazard rates also tended to be smaller with less than 5,000 buildings, and were located in drier areas of the Northwest, including Warm Springs, Oregon and Goldendale, Washington.
Chris Dunn, a co-author of the study, said the towns have “slightly lower wildfire exposure than some nearby, better-resourced communities like Bend and Leavenworth, but they experience greater social vulnerability and therefore are likely to experience greater impacts if a fire occurred.”
Home hardening and landscape and neighborhood wildfire prevention, smoke management plans, wildfire response — including where and how many fire stations and firefighters a community has — and successful postfire recovery are all driven in large part by residents’ access to resources, the researchers say.
Oregon has for the last decade struggled with increasingly intensifying wildfires, with this year’s season starting earlier than expected and projected to last until October. State fire officials attribute that to historic climate-change-driven heat and drought and a potentially early El Niño weather pattern that could further stir up temperatures and lightning storms.
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