Wildfires along the west coast are becoming more costly and damaging each fire season in both Canada and the United States. Societal costs incurred from wildfire suppression and recovery cause significant infrastructural and health challenges.

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Approximately 8000 wildfires occur in Canada each year,

with more than a quarter concentrated in the province of British Columbia (1).

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There is a need to develop system-level frameworks to predict and respond to wildfires at the community level, and there are notable local and international examples of successful strategies addressing wildfire mitigation and recovery (2; 3; 4). A recent publication by Oliveira et al. (2018) provides a framework for assessing community vulnerability to wildfire in the Mediterranean region, from which we draw our research question and analytic approach to develop a Wildfire Vulnerability Index for British Columbia.

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