Abstract
The public-good nature of benefits of fuel management explains its current undersupply and the consequent wildfire blow. Policies to promote fuel management are thus required. To be cost-effective, they need to be informed by context-specific estimates of forest owners’ willingness-to-accept (WTA) for managing fuel. This study develops a choice-modeling approach to this problem. A survey of forest owners was undertaken in a wildfire-prone parish in Portugal. Respondents were asked about their willingness to subscribe different management contracts. A choice model was estimated and used to predict owners’ WTA for different fuel management commitments, and the marginal cost of reducing burned area in the parish. Estimated WTA amounts depend on owner type and commitment. Active owners demanded lower amounts for adopting silvicultural intervention commitments, and higher for those implying income foregone. The marginal cost of reducing burned area through fuel management increases with area, but it currently is yet smaller than the corresponding marginal benefit. Our results suggest that zero burned area is not an option and optimum fuel management lies beyond the current level. It will be shifted even beyond by targeted (key-spot) fuel management approaches; WTA differences across owners can be used to design context-specific policies that are more cost-effective.
Highlights
With this study we aimed at: (1) comparing the minimum payment (WTA) amounts required by owners to perform fuel management, across types of fuel management commitments and across owner types, and exploring the economic logics, or rationalities underlying differences across commitments and owners; (2) using the understanding gained about these differences and economic logics to develop some implications for a more context-sensitive, and cost-effective policy, which would promote fuel management by forest owners to reduce wildfire hazard and risk; and (3) developing an exploratory marginal cost–benefit approach to discuss how far to go concerning fuel management intensity, and to explore the effects of a more targeted approach to fuel management on the location of this optimum
We present the estimated choice model, which predicts the probability of any particular owner subscribing any combination of fuel management commitments and payment levels
We present our estimates of the per hectare payment level that is required to achieve the parish-level area under shrub clearing that matches each of the two management intervention levels for which we could predict the corresponding avoided burned area
Summary
In some wildfire-prone regions, in particular in rainy and hilly Mediterranean areas, such as Portugal, the costs of fuel management are very significant These forest regions compete, in the global wood market, with many other areas where such costs are much lower, and global wood prices tend not to reflect the former regions’ extra costs [10]. In these circumstances, the small share of the benefits of wildfire hazard reduction accruing to the forest owner is often insufficient to support the full costs of fuel management in these wildfire-prone regions
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