What is it about?
Wildfires and power outages are becoming increasingly interconnected, creating challenges that no single organization can manage alone. We interviewed 23 practitioners from electric utilities, fire management, emergency management, transportation, public health, and health care organizations across Alaska to understand how they prepare for and respond to these risks. We found that even when organizations worked closely together during emergencies, collaboration was less consistent during preparedness and planning. Planning also tended to focus on wildfire and power outages as separate hazards rather than as interacting events. Consideration of socially vulnerable populations was often limited, highlighting opportunities to strengthen coordination and promote more equitable community resilience.
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Why is it important?
Wildfires and power outages are increasingly occurring together, yet most planning and preparedness efforts have focused on these hazards separately. Our study is among the first to examine how electric utilities, emergency management, fire services, transportation, public health, and health care organizations coordinate around wildfire–power outage interactions. By identifying gaps in cross-sector collaboration and limited integration of social vulnerability into decision-making, this work provides timely insights for communities seeking to strengthen equitable resilience in the face of increasingly complex climate-related hazards.
Perspectives
This work reinforced for me the importance of relationships in the "how" of climate adaptation. Climate change is creating new challenges through interacting and cascading hazards that often require collaboration among organizations that may not have worked together previously and that bring different vocabularies, priorities, and ways of approaching problems. One takeaway from this study is that equity is fundamentally a collective action challenge. While there are still important gaps in policy and regulation, many opportunities to advance equitable resilience lie in building stronger cross-sector partnerships. By developing shared goals around public health and resilience—and the relationships needed to support them—organizations may be better positioned to protect communities facing increasingly complex risks.
Claire A Richards
Washington State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “It takes two to tango”: a qualitative study of cross-sectoral collaboration at the community-wildfire-energy interface in Alaska, Environmental Research Health, June 2026, Institute of Physics Publishing,
DOI: 10.1088/2752-5309/ae8052.
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