With round three of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant awardees just announced and looking ahead to round four, FAC Net staff have been thinking a lot about Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) — the different guidance and templates available, the variety of approaches to community engagement and stakeholder feedback, and examples of plans that touch on various components of the fire adapted communities framework.
FAC Net staff have been collecting input from communities around the country through our Community Navigators project to understand what kinds of resources and examples they need to help prepare the best CWPPs and be competitive in their CWDG applications.
One way we are trying to meet that need is by offering free online continuing education around CWPP development. This past year we hosted:
- A basic overview of CWPP development with The Ember Alliance (recordings in English, Spanish are available).
- A deep dive on cross-walking CWPPs with other plans such as Tribal Hazard Mitigation Plans, All-Hazards Mitigation Plans, and Utility Hazard Mitigation Plans (recording available here).
- How to integrate smoke preparedness and smoke community response plans in your CWPP (recording available here).
- How to incorporate planning for post-fire recovery in your CWPP (recording available here).
The other way we are supporting community CWPP development is by updating this popular portal and data library, hosted on fireadapted.org.
Based on practitioner feedback about the webpage, our team added additional background information, new featured resources, highlighted sample CWPPs, and added a filterable resource library dedicated to CWPP resources.
Stay tuned because we are not done yet! We are making additional updates to the webpage throughout 2025 and partnering with the researchers who originally built the CWPP story map to provide updates to the database. Check back next year for an updated map!
We’d like to know…
What tools, resources, or training would be most helpful to you in developing your CWPP? Are you a CWDG awardee who is working on your first CWPP or updating a very old one and feel like you could use a little guidance? Please let us know!
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