The escalating climate and wildfire crises have generated worldwide interest in using proactive forest management (e.g. forest thinning, prescribed fire, cultural burning) to mitigate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in forests. To estimate the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss in western United States (US) conifer forests, we used a generalizable framework to evaluate interactions among wildfire hazard and carbon exposure and vulnerability. By evaluating where high social adaptive capacity for proactive forest management overlaps with carbon most vulnerable to wildfire-caused carbon loss, we identified opportunity hot spots for reducing the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss. We found that relative to their total forest area, California, New Mexico, and Arizona contained the greatest proportion of carbon highly vulnerable to wildfire-caused loss. We also observed widespread opportunities in the western US for using proactive forest management to reduce the risk of wildfire-caused carbon loss, with many areas containing opportunities for simultaneously mitigating the greatest risk from wildfire to carbon and human communities. Finally, we highlighted collaborative and equitable processes that provide pathways to achieving timely climate- and wildfire-mitigation goals at opportunity hot spots.

As climate change facilitates significant and persistent ecological transformations, managing ecosystems according to historical baseline conditions may no longer be feasible. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework can guide climate-informed management interventions, but in its current implementations RAD has not yet fully accounted for potential tradeoffs between multiple – sometimes incompatible – ecological and societal goals. Key scientific challenges for informing climate-adapted ecosystem management include (i) advancing our predictive understanding of transformations and their socioecological impacts under novel climate conditions, and (ii) incorporating uncertainty around trajectories of ecological change and the potential success of RAD interventions into management decisions. To promote the implementation of RAD, practitioners can account for diverse objectives within just and equitable participatory decision-making processes.