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FPA Background
The federal government spends billions of dollars each year on wildland fire management, spread over multiple agencies and jurisdictions for essentially the same work. With current modeling systems, it is difficult to know how effective we are within a particular fire planning unit (FPU). This situation frequently results in inefficiencies and duplication of effort within a geographic area.
The Interagency Federal Wildland Fire Policy (developed in 1995 and reaffirmed in 2001), the 10-year Comprehensive Strategy, and the Hubbard Report, all recommend developing a common interagency planning and budget analysis system for the federal wildland fire community. Further direction from Congress and the executive branch mandate such a system for the five federal agencies involved in wildland fire management. These agencies are BLM, USFS, BIA, NPS, and USFWS.
Presently, several fire analysis systems guide fire planning efforts; each is designed to meet specific agency missions. While these systems have worked fairly well, they do not easily promote interagency planning and budget formulation across agency and department boundaries. Because of this limitation, these systems have not adapted to meet the needs of today's complex fire management organization, with its expanded mission.
Policy Statement from the FPA Charter
The following policy statement dictates the parameters of the FPA project and can be found on page 5 of the FPA Charter, dated November 7, 2002:
"Agencies will use compatible planning processes, funding mechanisms, training and qualification requirements, operational procedures, values-to-be-protected methodologies, and public education programs for all fire management activities.
Fire management planning, preparedness, prevention, suppression, fire use, restoration and rehabilitation, monitoring research, and education will be conducted on an interagency basis with the involvement of cooperators and partners.
Fire management programs and activities are economically viable, based upon values-to-be-protected, costs, and land and resource management objectives."
Purpose and Need for FPA
To restate the policy statement more succinctly,
"The purpose of the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) System is to provide managers with a common interagency process for fire management planning and budgeting and to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative fire management strategies through time, in order to meet land management goals and objectives."
By allowing for landscape-scale, interagency analysis at the planning unit level, fire planners can submit the most effective fire management budget requests at various cost levels that address the needs of the local unit.
As part of FPA, all five federal agencies involved in wildland fire will use the same business processes, models, assumptions, and displays. Budget alternatives will be rolled up across all agencies to a national database, which will facilitate analysis of the budget across and between agencies. FPA will also be available to state and local agencies that choose to participate.
Overview of the Philosophy
Like previous systems, FPA operates within the context of the land and fire management plans, which means that much of the data used as inputs in the previous system are still valid for FPA.
However, the theoretical underpinnings of FPA differ significantly from previous systems. The primary difference between FPA and previous modeling systems is the way the economic model works in evaluating performance based on weighted acres managed (WAM) vs. costs. Because FPA uses a significantly different approach, the results from the optimization model may not reflect current or past decisions.
Three important areas reflect this difference in philosophy:
- Single, interagency system. FPA integrates fire management planning efforts at all levels, from the national centers to the fire planning unit (FPU) level. From a strategic perspective, this integration facilitates cooperation, improves effectiveness, and enables resource sharing in the field. With previous systems, each agency had its own policies and budgets, and officially coordinated efforts only at the national level and as required on specific fires. Under the old system, even cooperative efforts were constrained by differences among agencies regarding resource allocation and policy.
- Performance-based planning and budgeting. Weighting provides a common measurement that is broad enough to accommodate the varied missions of the different agencies, while also including the specific considerations and resource impacts that can occur in a particular FPU. Performance-based planning measures the performance in physical rather than monetary terms, and establishes a functional relationship between performance and cost. This model provides a range of costs or appropriations that will affect performance levels, rather than identifying a most efficient level.
- Optimization planning: Instead of simulating past behavior as previous systems do, FPA uses an optimization algorithm to find the most effective allocation of resources for a particular FPU. FPA makes decisions based on the fire resource's line production, cost, arrival time, and the weight of the fires. The optimization algorithm tool enables you to make better strategic decisions for the future. Because of this shift, some results may look different from previous budgeting and resource allocation efforts. Of course, the quality of the data you provide will also affect these results, so it's important to provide clean data that is as robust as possible.
In addition, FPA enables you to quantify the planning goals and objectives so that you can analyze the effect of different cost levels on performance. FPA is designed to manage trade-offs to maximize performance at a given cost level. The figure, "Cost vs. WAM", shows an example of how the theoretical CEA (cost-effectiveness analysis) curve looks.
Within FPA, the philosophy is to solve for the optimal initial response resource mix that provides the most performance at different budget limitations.
Related Topics:
FPA Project |
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