When it comes to mitigating wildfire damage in the wildland urban interface, federal mitigation efforts aren’t exactly blazing a trail to safety. In fact, only 11 percent of federal fuel reduction measures in the past five years have occurred in the areas where community meets forest, according to a recent University of Colorado press release.

The dearth of mitigation was uncovered in a just released study led by CU researcher Tania Schoennagel. Schoennagel and a team of scientists that included geographers and ecologists examined 44,000 federally-funded wildfire mitigation projects in 11 western states between 2004 and 2008, according to the release.

“We were very surprised by our results,” Schoennagel told the Los Angeles Times. “It's a problem.”

The problem, however, isn’t all federal. According to the research, 70 percent of wildland urban interface land is privately owned, making it difficult and costly to undertake large fuel reduction projects—a dynamic that led researchers to call for a “significant shift in fire policy emphasis from federal to private lands.”

But the disconnect between federal authority and local land use could make it difficult for that shift to materialize, Schoenagel said in an Associated Press story.

“Fire suppression is doing an outstanding job, but there is only so much they can do," she told the AP. "So we are probably going to continue to have more home losses unless we have communities more adapted to fire.”

With a bloom of housing springing up in the interface—68 percent growth since 1990, according to the CU release—the time is right to lay the groundwork for more substantial adaptation requirements. But before that can happen, people will need to develop a more defensive attitude about the risks of building in fire-prone areas.

“With crime, we lock our doors and we get a security system,” Schoenagel said in the AP article. “With earthquakes, quake-proof construction is required in earthquake zones. We are not allowed to build in 100-year flood plains. But with wildfire, it's different. We don't lock our homes down to fire.”