About
USGBC-LA’s Wildfire Defense Education and Tours promote awareness by providing resource guides by topic and expert advice to empower our community, property owners, designers, and managers to proactively reduce wildfire hazards and minimize losses.
Our region now faces a 365-days-a-year fire season with devastating and potentially deadly consequences. There are steps Angelenos can take to protect properties, mitigate the region’s fire danger, and increase the city’s resilience. Architects, builders, developers, urban planners, and landscapers have critical roles to play–keep reading to find out how the green building community is taking action!
Download The FREE Toolkit
Goals
Our goals with the Wildfire Defense Education Program are to provide:
- Education on best practices to help make homes and properties wildfire resistant
- Free access to wildfire defense resources for our community
- Property tours in wildfire risk areas
The USGBC-LA Wildfire Defense Professional Certificate Program was developed to educate contractors and landscapers on how to best harden homes and landscapes to fires through the use of materials, maintenance practices, and firewise design practices known to reduce properties’ risk of fire damage. These trainings intend to prime the pathway for the private market to drive adoption of firewise best practices and create cultural change within the building industry. The training highlights existing resources and includes information from advisors across the field to instill awareness and transfer knowledge around industry-leading best practices that reduce fire risk in homes and landscapes.
Check out our workshops for Construction Professionals and Landscapers!
Each module is a 150-minute training followed by certification testing to be taken online. This certification training provides participants with real-world examples and strategies for fire risk reduction. Our Landscaper’s module piloted on September 29, 2022, and the Contractor’s module pilots on November 10, 2022. In 2023, each module will be offered once per quarter.
Our tours showcase detailed risk reduction strategies, including up-to-date home-hardening and firewise landscaping strategies to professionals as well as the general public and residents, offering clear and substantive guidance for fire mitigation and safety.
Watch the recording of our Wildfire Defense Forum and Virtual Tours from the 2021 community event below to learn more about:
- The importance of location in relation to fire pathways
- Simple vs. complex design to minimize building heat traps
- Low ignition materials and sealed building envelope
- Effective defensible space
- Strategic (firewise native) plant choice and placement
- Removal of highly flammable and invasive grasses and trees
Videos:
- Thought Leadership Series: Reducing California’s Fire Risk – Tour led by Plant Prefab
- Thought Leadership Series: Reducing California’s Fire Risk – Tour led by: The Resource Conservation District of Santa Monica
- Thought Leadership Series: Reducing California’s Fire Risk – Tour led by: The Chaparral Institute
- Thought Leadership Series: Reducing California’s Fire Risk – Tour led by: FormLA Landscaping
- Thought Leadership Series: Reducing California’s Fire Risk – Tour led by: USGBC NorCal
- Firewise or fiction? Explore common misunderstandings about wildfires and the truth about protecting properties
- Mandeville Canyon Fire-Hardened Home Tour – Learn strategies for home hardening and defensive landscaping
- Virtual Tour of Firewise Homes in Malibu and Brentwood – Creating defensive landscapes through design strategies
- Creating Firewise Properties Webinar
- USGBC-LA & SCAG Wildfire Defense Forum & Virtual Tour
Join Our Urban Landscaping Committee!
The USGBC-LA Urban Landscape Committee seeks to protect and expand access to high-quality green space. Our focus will be in the places where nature can have the greatest impact on community health and resilience–our public schools and youth in our local, historically excluded communities.
Resources
We are gracious for the invaluable network of professionals in our community that helped us develop the resources we are able to share today. Those include a toolkit, a certification workshop for landscaper and contractor professionals, Thought Leadership Series, tours, and many, many brilliant people!
Click here for valuable and comprehensive resources related to home-hardening and wildfire defense landscaping process resources.
Do you want to be involved or would like to receive more information? Please contact us!
