Valuing co-benefits of forest fuels treatment for reducing wildfire risk in California's Sierra Nevada

As wildfires in the western United States grow in frequency and severity, forest fuels treatment has been increasingly recognized as essential for enhancing forest resilience and mitigating wildfire risks. However, the economic valuation of the treatment's co-benefits remains underexplored, limiting integration into financial and policy decision making. Using highly forested land in California's Sierra Nevada as study areas, this study provides a methodology to quantify the economic benefits of forest fuels treatment in mitigating wildfire-induced losses across multiple ecosystem services, including carbon storage, timber provisioning, erosion regulation, and air-quality regulation. Integrating historical data on forest disturbances, ecological variables, and market-based ecosystem service valuation models, we demonstrate that treatment can substantially reduce wildfire risk and deliver measurable, significant economic benefits at a landscape level. The magnitude of these benefits is site specific and sensitive to burn probability, treatment intensity, and the baseline value of affected ecosystem services. This quantitative analysis provides a scalable approach to inform regional forest management strategies. It can also support innovative financing mechanisms such as public–private cost-sharing models, which can accelerate the pace and scale of forest fuels treatment efforts that enhance ecosystem sustainability and community resilience in wildfire-vulnerable landscapes.