Economic Impacts of Fire

Wildfires are heating up once again in the American West. In 2015, wildfires burned more than 10 million acres in the United States at a cost of $2.1 billion in federal expenditures. As the fires burned, the U.S. Forest Service announced that, for the first time, more than half of its budget would be devoted to wildfire. And the situation is likely to get worse.

Oregon's State Wood Energy Team (SWET) is a state-level network supported by the United States Forest Service and led by Oregon Department of Forestry. The purpose of the SWET is to bring together experts in biomass energy to support the successful development and implemen-tation of wood energy systems and businesses.

The hazards-of-place model posits that vulnerability to environmental hazards depends on both biophysical and social factors. Biophysical factors determine where wildfire potential is elevated, whereas social factors determine where and how people are affected by wildfire. We evaluated place vulnerability to wildfire hazards in the coterminous US.

The Fremont-Winema National Forest and the Lakeview Stewardship Group were awarded funding under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) Program in 2012 for the 662,289 acre Lakeview Stewardship Project. The CFLR Program, administered by the U.S.

Over 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service to manage America’s 193-million acre national forests and grasslands for the benefit of all Americans.

Over the past century, wildland fire management has been core to the mission of federal land management agencies.

Wildfire-potential information products are designed to support decisions for prefire staging of movable wildfire suppression resources across geographic locations.

Wildfire activity and escalating suppression costs continue to threaten the financial health of federal land management agencies. In order to minimize and effectively manage the cost of financial risk, agencies need the ability to quantify that risk. A fundamental aim of this research effort, therefore, is to develop a process for generating risk-based metrics for annual suppression costs.

Little research has focused on the economic impact associated with climate-change induced wildland fire on natural ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. We examine changes in wildland fire patterns based on the U.S.

Humans cause more than 55% of wildfires on lands managed by the USDA Forest Service and US Department of the Interior, contributing to both suppression expenditures and damages.