SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah Utah Law Digital Commons Utah Law Faculty Scholarship Utah Law Scholarship 2019 Adaptive Management for Ecosystem Services at the Wildland-Urban Interface Robin Kundis Craig S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah,
[email protected] J.B. Ruhl Vanderbilt University Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship Part of the Environmental Law Commons, and the Natural Resources Law Commons Recommended Citation Craig, Robin Kundis and Ruhl, J.B., "Adaptive Management for Ecosystem Services at the Wildland-Urban Interface" (2019). Utah Law Faculty Scholarship. 152. https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/152 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Utah Law Scholarship at Utah Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Utah Law Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Utah Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AT THE WILDLAND-URBAN INTERFACE Robin Craig and J.B. Ruhl ABSTRACT Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars have fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI—that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the factor that rampant wildfire is itself the product of incursions into important ecosystem services on both sides of the interface.