Kelly Pohl is Associate Director of Headwaters Economics. She works closely with her team to shape program goals and identify opportunities to advance the organization’s mission. Kelly’s policy knowledge and aptitude for strategizing and messaging help Headwaters Economics remain at the forefront of emerging issues.
In her role as Headwaters Economics’ operations lead, Kelly is known for her can-do attitude, her astute use of technology for planning and project tracking, and her foresight regarding workflow resources, bottlenecks, and opportunities. She continually steers the team toward thoughtful action, ensuring that staff members reach their full potential in a positive environment.
Kelly has led the design and development of many of Headwaters Economics’ nationally-recognized research products and tools. With a knack for making complex information visually compelling and actionable, she led the development of the Unequal Impacts of Wildfire tool demonstrating where exposure to wildfire intersects socioeconomic vulnerabilities, and she serves as the U.S. Forest Services’ point of contact for the Wildfire Risk to Communities tool, the first nationwide map of wildfire risk to communities. She has also conducted original research on state funding mechanisms for outdoor recreation and conservation, best practices for recreation in municipal watersheds, and the costs of wildfire-resistant home construction.
Before joining Headwaters, Kelly led community-based finance campaigns for trails and conservation and oversaw the design and construction of multi-million dollar trail projects for a local nonprofit organization. She coordinated public/private partnerships and led dozens of public access and private conservation projects. With a master’s degree in geography, she has also worked as a fire ecologist and a park naturalist. A Montana native, Kelly is intimately familiar with small-town dynamics, strengths, and challenges. She represents Headwaters Economics on topics including wildfire, outdoor recreation, socioeconomic equity, and climate adaptation – not as hypothetical situations, but as they impact real people in real communities. In her spare time, she volunteers as the chair of Bozeman’s Transportation Advisory Board and on the Land Conservation Committee for the local land trust.
Colorado’s code design considered stakeholder input, including interviews and a survey conducted by Headwaters Economics and the University of Colorado Denver.
Extreme heat poses health risks to millions of rural Americans. Solutions need to be tailored to meet the unique characteristics of rural places.
More than 1,100 communities in 32 states face similar risks to Los Angeles and other places with recent urban wildfires, highlighting the urgent need for wildfire-resistant homes and neighborhoods.
A Forest Service program is helping communities across the nation reduce wildfire risk—including those that don’t normally have the resources to successfully compete for federal grants.
New climate data and methodology enhances Wildfire Risk to Communities, a free online tool for understanding wildfire risks across the United States.
An independent analysis by Headwaters Economics shows that the first round of funding from the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program prioritized high-risk, low-income communities.
Statewide wildfire safety standards are proven and cost effective. Montana can adopt standards to help make communities safer from increasing wildfire risks.
See where wildfire risk intersects social and economic factors that can make it difficult for people to prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfire.
Updated: For communities land use planning is more effective than logging on federal lands to reduce future wildfire disasters.
Communities and local leaders can utilize this trails toolkit to better understand whether and how trails can accomplish local goals, along with the cost and benefits of proposed projects.
A new home built to wildfire-resistant codes can be constructed for roughly the same cost as a typical home.
Explore interactive maps of watersheds, wildfire, and the wildland-urban interface in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.
Partners in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are working to better understand the impacts of wildfire to communities, watersheds, and quality of life.
Identify neighborhoods where overlapping wildfire threats and socioeconomic vulnerabilities may make people disproportionately susceptible to wildfire.
Best practices for balancing the needs for clean drinking water, recreation, and economic development in municipal watersheds.
The number of western Montana homes in areas with high wildfire hazard has doubled, outpacing development rates in areas with low wildfire hazard.
Updated: The Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program now helps 30 communities reduce wildfire risk through improved land use planning.
County governments, fire districts and service areas, and landowners have many opportunities to reduce wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface through land use planning tools and strategies, though challenges in Montana’s regulatory framework remain.
Hispanics account for roughly one in four westerners and one in six rural westerners.
A lack of land use planning amplified the devastation from Hurricane Harvey. Wildfire-prone communities should take note.
New research highlights opportunities to improve wildfire risk models that inform planning, building codes, and risk management.
Federal public lands may offer opportunities to improve housing affordability in a limited number of states, but will face significant barriers from wildfire risk, water availability, and conflicts with existing resource or recreation uses.
New modeling of trail use in Cibola and McKinley counties, New Mexico has identified more than $1.7 million in visitor contributions to the local economy each year.
A new map helps identify communities where investments in staffing and expertise are needed to support infrastructure and climate resilience projects.
In this ten-minute video produced by Headwaters Economics, learn how leaders in Austin, TX came to realize the magnitude of the wildfire threat, and how they brought together diverse interests to protect their community.
Kelly Pohl, who researches climate resilience, housing and land use at Headwaters Economics said that in high-demand places like mountain towns and coastal areas disasters tend to accelerate gentrification.
“There are a lot of cities that share similarities with what happened in Los Angeles,” said Kelly Pohl with Headwaters Economics, a non-profit research group in Montana that had done research on the cost of retrofitting homes to protect against wildfires. Think Boise, Idaho. Salt Lake City.
“A lot of Montanans can do things before a fire starts,” said Kelly Pohl, an the associate director of Headwaters Economics. “We have to realize that wildfire is part of our landscape, so we have to take actions to reduce the likelihood that it will destroy property.”
Wildfires threaten nearly one-third of U.S. residents and buildings, according to a new government analysis that suggests the risk is greater than previously known. The Forest Service, working with Montana researchers, took a new approach to measuring wildfire risk and limited its historical analysis to the 15 years between 2004 and 2018.