Economic Impacts of Fire

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.

Wildfire activity in the United States incurs substantial costs and losses, and presents challenges to federal, state, tribal and local agencies that have responsibility for wildfire management. Beyond the potential socioeconomic and ecological losses, and the monetary costs to taxpayers due to suppression, wildfire management is a dangerous occupation.

Over 1200 post-fire assessment and treatment implementation reports from four decades (1970s–2000s) of western US forest fires have been examined to identify decadal patterns in fire characteristics and the justifications and expenditures for the post-fire treatments.