Wildfire Suppression Costs Research Articles

Estimating wildfire suppression costs: a systematic review

The cost of suppressing fires is known to be highly significant and increasing over time as a result of the indirect effects of climate change and rising human impacts. Their quantification is an essential component of an environmental accounting system, capable of providing updated information for policy design and implementation. The goal of this study was to provide an overview of the state-of-art of international literature on wildfire suppression costs. To this aim, a systematic literature review was carried out revealing that the largest amount of empirical data on suppression costs and related measures derived from North American case studies. Conversely, information on direct wildfire suppression cost categories is usually incomplete or missing throughout Europe, especially in fire-prone Mediterranean countries, even though these areas have been, and continue to be, severely impacted by wildfires, underlining the need to update research in this field, thereby supporting cost-effective fire management plans.

Ancillary Impacts of Harvest Residue Pelletization

This paper analyzes the implications on employment, taxation, and wildfire fuel reduction costs when using mobile pellet mills to remove biomass and reduce wildfire fuels. Wildfire suppression costs in British Columbia have exceeded the set budget in 9 of the last 10 years and the province has only reduced the fuel load on a fraction of the high-risk hectares. Using a novel high-moisture mobile pellet mill allows the production of 89,000 tonnes of wood pellets each year for a price of $293 . Each tonne produced also provides $546 in additional benefits from employment, taxation, and reductions in the cost to perform fuel treatments. The presented research found that 11 employees are needed to operate a mobile pellet mill, with total employment of 242 for 22 systems across BC. The assessed system can also avoid $5.5 million in employment insurance payments. The 22 systems also provide $323,000 in taxable profits and $524,000 from income taxes from employees. Fuel treatment with the researched systems costs $1112 . A cost-benefit analysis shows that the system provides $2.97 in benefits for every dollar invested.

A Cost Analysis of Mobile and Stationary Pellet Mills for Mitigating Wildfire Costs

A comparison of traditional and mobile wood pellet mills found that mobile systems had higher production costs. Wildfire suppression costs have consistently exceeded British Columbia’s budget set for such activities. Pelletization of excess wood for bioenergy applications has been proposed as a possible method of reducing the overall costs of fighting wildfires. In this study, a traditional pellet mill produces wood pellets from new, marginal feedstocks for $182.24 ± 24.47 and a mobile pellet production system produces wood pellets for $402.71 ± 24.18 . The traditional pellet mill produces 90,000 with harvest residues being collected in the forest, transported to the pellet mill, dried, chipped, pelletized and then stored. The mobile system collects harvest residues from the forest, transports them to the forest landing where the trailer-mounted mobile pellet system is established and is then ground, pelletized and dried if needed. The mobile system uses a novel high moisture pelletization system and harvest residues to heat the biomass dryer used in the system. The mobile pellet system requires 22 systems to produce 90,000 and each system should relocate 9 times in a year to minimize production costs related to feedstock quality and scarcity. These mobile pellet systems can allow increased forest management in forest areas at high risk for wildfires and reduce the cost of suppressing wildfires in treated areas.

Do Fuel Treatments in U.S. National Forests Reduce Wildfire Suppression Costs and Property Damage?

ABSTRACT This article tests two hypotheses on whether forest fuel reduction treatments (prescribed burning and mechanical methods) reduce wildfire suppression costs and property damages. Data were collected on fuel treatments, fire suppression costs, and property damage associated with wildfires in United States National Forests over a five-year period throughout the continental United States. The continental U.S. pooled data model results show that overall, prescribed burning reduces suppression cost and both fuel treatment types reduce property damages. Further analysis was done to separate the data into seven geographic regions of the United States. Results of the multiple regressions show that in California and the northern Rockies, mechanical fuel treatments reduce wildfire suppression costs, while only in California did prescribed burning reduce the cost. The second hypothesis tested is that fuel treatments, by making wildfires less damaging and easier to control, may reduce property damage. This hypothesis is generally confirmed for hectares treated with prescribed burning in four out of five geographic regions that had a significant coefficient on prescribed fire. Mechanical fuel reduction had a significant effect in reducing property damage in two of the three regions.

Changes in potential wildland fire suppression costs due to restoration treatments in Northern Arizona Ponderosa pine forests

Wildfire suppression costs have been increasing since the early 1970's. With growing concern over wildfire suppression costs, our analysis addresses restoration treatment effectiveness in reducing wildfire suppression costs. We examine past fires across the Northern Arizona landscape to determine fire behavior characteristics that are significant in predicting wildfire suppression costs and capable of being modeled in fire simulations prior to wildfire events. We find burn severity metrics to be significant in predicting wildfire suppression costs. Three proposed treatment alternatives for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4-FRI) are analyzed to determine treatment effectiveness and policy implications in reducing burn severity metrics and wildfire suppression costs. The more aggressive treatments are more effective in reducing wildfire suppression costs except in the case of sever wind and weather events.

Establishing the Wildland-Urban interface building risk index (WUIBRI): The case study of Beit-Meri

Dwellers experience a constant threat of wildfires when constructing their residences in woodland settings in or near forests. In these regions, also recognized as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), consequences of wildfires can be fatal to humans, animals and vegetation. The establishment of wildfire risk indexes is useful when produced on a community scale; these indexes proved their effectiveness worldwide to identify vulnerabilities to ignition and fire spread, to understand the underlying science and to simulate exposure. In this paper, four main inputs (i.e. wildfire likelihood, defensible space, building envelope, and community infrastructure) are used to produce the WUI Building Risk Index (WUIBRI), representing the wildfire likelihood at the property-level, in a typical WUI area, namely, Beit-Meri – Lebanon. Results show that one fourth of the total buildings have an undesirable WUIBRI value – greater than eight, demanding fast response and effective mitigation techniques. This index illustrates a weak positive spatial autocorrelation in the study area, which measures dependency among sub-regions, and no relationship with the buildings’ prices.A Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is conducted and projected over the next five years from the date of the study. Under the conservative scenario, output reveals that implementing simple measures (i.e. pruning and trimming vegetation around the home, creating two-ways roads with two exits, establishing fire sprinklers system) reduces WUIBRI values; accordingly, decreasing the wildfire threat would require only 20% on the first year and 6.15% on the long run (for the next five years) of the total costs when only one wildfire occurs per year. It is recommended that homeowners, municipalities, and decision-makers, join forces to create a fire-adapted community. The approach outlined in this study is achievable in other Mediterranean regions to reduce wildfire suppression costs.

Wildfire Suppression Costs for Canada under a Changing Climate.

Climate-influenced changes in fire regimes in northern temperate and boreal regions will have both ecological and economic ramifications. We examine possible future wildfire area burned and suppression costs using a recently compiled historical (i.e., 1980–2009) fire management cost database for Canada and several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate projections. Area burned was modelled as a function of a climate moisture index (CMI), and fire suppression costs then estimated as a function of area burned. Future estimates of area burned were generated from projections of the CMI under two emissions pathways for four General Circulation Models (GCMs); these estimates were constrained to ecologically reasonable values by incorporating a minimum fire return interval of 20 years. Total average annual national fire management costs are projected to increase to just under $1 billion (a 60% real increase from the 1980–2009 period) under the low greenhouse gas emissions pathway and $1.4 billion (119% real increase from the base period) under the high emissions pathway by the end of the century. For many provinces, annual costs that are currently considered extreme (i.e., occur once every ten years) are projected to become commonplace (i.e., occur once every two years or more often) as the century progresses. It is highly likely that evaluations of current wildland fire management paradigms will be necessary to avoid drastic and untenable cost increases as the century progresses.

The Economics of Ecological Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction Treatments in the Ponderosa Pine Forest Ecosystem

In this article, we develop a simulation model of the benefits and costs of managing the ponderosa pine forest ecosystem in the southwestern United States. Using the model, we evaluate and compare the economic benefits and costs of ecological restoration and hazardous fuel reduction treatments. Both treatment approaches increase the expected number of low-severity wildfires, which can promote postfire rehabilitation. Hazardous fuel reduction treatments are likely to reduce expected wildfire suppression costs, but not enough to offset the costs of implementing treatments. Conversely, ecological restoration treatments do not necessarily reduce expected wildfire suppression costs but fully restore the ecosystem in more than half of the simulation runs, which lowers the need for future fire suppression and reduces the chance of conversion to nonforest, alternative stable states. We find that the choice between hazardous fuel reduction and ecological treatments will depend on the management objective being pursued, as well as on site-specific factors such as the wildfire return interval and the economic value of biomass removed.

The economics of fuel management: Wildfire, invasive plants, and the dynamics of sagebrush rangelands in the western United States

In this article we develop a simulation model to evaluate the economic efficiency of fuel treatments and apply it to two sagebrush ecosystems in the Great Basin of the western United States: the Wyoming Sagebrush Steppe and Mountain Big Sagebrush ecosystems. These ecosystems face the two most prominent concerns in sagebrush ecosystems relative to wildfire: annual grass invasion and native conifer expansion. Our model simulates long-run wildfire suppression costs with and without fuel treatments explicitly incorporating ecological dynamics, stochastic wildfire, uncertain fuel treatment success, and ecological thresholds. Our results indicate that, on the basis of wildfire suppression costs savings, fuel treatment is economically efficient only when the two ecosystems are in relatively good ecological health. We also investigate how shorter wildfire-return intervals, improved treatment success rates, and uncertainty about the location of thresholds between ecological states influence the economic efficiency of fuel treatments.

Quantifying the Potential Impacts of Fuel Treatments on Wildfire Suppression Costs

Modeling the impacts and effects of hazardous fuel reduction treatments is a pressing issue within the wildfire management community. Prospective evaluation of fuel treatment effectiveness allows for comparison of alternative treatment strategies in terms of socioeconomic and ecological impacts and facilitates analysis of tradeoffs across land-management objectives. Studies have yet to rigorously examine potential impacts to fire suppression expenditures associated with prior hazardous fuel reduction treatments. Such information would be helpful for federal land-management agencies struggling to contain escalating wildfire management costs. In this article we establish a methodology for estimating potential reductions in wildfire suppression costs. Our approach pairs wildfire simulation outputs with a regression cost model and quantifies the influence of fuel treatments on distributions of wildfire sizes and suppression costs. Our case study focuses on a landscape within the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon that was selected to receive funding under the auspices of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. Results suggest substantial reductions in distributions of wildfire size and suppression cost on a per fire basis. Furthermore, because fewer ignitions become large fires on the treated landscape, distributions of annual area burned and annual suppression costs also shift downward because of fuel treatments. Results are contingent on four key factors: large-scale implementation of fuel treatments across the landscape, assumed treatment effectiveness over the duration of the analysis period, accuracy of wildfire and cost models, and accuracy of projected changes to fire behavior fuel models resulting from fuel treatments. We discuss strengths and limitations of the modeling approach and offer suggestions for future improvements and applications.

Evidence for the effect of homes on wildfire suppression costs

This paper uses wildfires in the Sierra Nevada area of California to estimate the relationship between housing and fire suppression costs. We investigated whether the presence of homes was associated with increased costs of firefighting after controlling for the effects of potential confounding variables including fire size, weather, terrain and human factors such as road access. This paper investigates wildfires in a way that other published studies have not; we analysed costs at the daily level, retaining information that would have been lost had we aggregated the data. We used linear mixed models to estimate the effects of homes on daily costs while incorporating within-fire variation. We conclude that the expected increase in the log daily cost with each unit increase in the log count of homes within 6 miles (~9.7 km) of an active fire is 0.07 (P = 0.005). The findings of this study are in agreement with most other previous empirical studies that have investigated the relationship between fire suppression costs and housing using cumulative fire costs and more generalised data on home locations. The study adds to mounting evidence that increases in housing lead to increases in fire suppression costs.

An econometric model for ex ante prediction of wildfire suppression costs

This paper develops an econometric model that can provide predictions of fire suppression costs (per acre and in total) for a given large fire before final fire acreage is known. The model jointly estimates cost per acre and acreage equations via Maximum Likelihood, accounting for sample truncation based on final fire size. Formulas and results are shown for predictions of costs and fire size for wildfires in general, and for large fires in particular. Marginal effects of explanatory variables on cost and acreage are discussed. The distribution of these model predictions illustrates the importance of accounting for sample truncation when generating predicted outcomes based on ex ante information.

Using Q-methodology to identify local perspectives on wildfires in two Koyukon Athabascan communities in rural Alaska

Sustainable resource management depends upon the participation of resource-dependent communities. Competing values between community members and government agencies and among groups within a community can make it difficult to find mutually acceptable management goals and can disadvantage certain resource users. This study uses Q-methodology to discover groups with shared perspectives on wildfire policy in the Koyukon Athabascan villages of Galena and Huslia, Alaska. Before the study, participants appeared to disagree over the amount of wildfire suppression needed, but Q-method results showed three perspectives united around deeper, less oppositional concerns: Caucasian residents and resource managers who preferred natural processes; older Koyukon residents concerned about losing local control, small animals, and cultural places; and younger Koyukon residents who felt subsistence activities were resilient to social-ecological change. Additionally, both Koyukon groups suspected it was cheaper to suppress all wildfires while small. These results imply that community frustration with wildfire management may be reduced through collaborative research with Koyukon elders on locally important issues, cultural site mapping in order to extend some level of wildfire protection, and greater agency transparency about wildfire-suppression costs. The results also indicate that age may be an understudied driver of community resource-use preferences. This study proposes that without identifying resource user-interest groups and their main concerns, it is difficult to develop equitable environmental goals. It shows how Q-methodology provides a systematic approach for identifying the stakeholders and issues needed in resource management.

The Effect of Newspaper Coverage and Political Pressure on Wildfire Suppression Costs

Controlling wildfire suppression expenditures has become a major public policy concern in the United States. However, most policy remedies have focused on the biophysical determinants of suppression costs: fuel loads and weather, for example. We show that two non-biophysical variables—newspaper coverage and political pressure—have a significant effect on wildfire suppression costs. Hausman tests showed that newspaper coverage and fire size were endogenous, so regression models were estimated using two-stage least squares. We suggest a number of non-biophysical policy remedies that may be able to reduce wildfire suppression expenditures more cost-effectively than traditional biophysical remedies such as fuel management.

Suppression Cost Forecasts in Advance of Wildfire Seasons

Abstract Approaches for forecasting wildfire suppression costs in advance of a wildfire season are demonstrated for two lead times: fall and spring of the current fiscal year (Oct. 1–Sept. 30). Model functional forms are derived from aggregate expressions of a least cost plus net value change model. Empirical estimates of these models are used to generate advance-of-season forecasts. Cost forecasts involve estimation of suppression cost equations by geographical region based on a time series of historical data (1977–2006) of costs, a time trend, and climate variables, forecasts of the next season's suppression costs, by region and in total across all regions, and generation of suppression cost forecast probability distributions by region and in aggregate. The forecasts are also evaluated historically for their goodness of fit using cross-validation techniques. The two lead time forecast models are compared with the 10-year moving average of suppression costs, currently used as a budget request formula by the US Forest Service. Results show that the spring forecast of suppression costs is statistically no better than the fall forecast for predicting the coming season's costs. However, both the spring and fall forecasts significantly outperform the 10-year moving average, reducing forecast errors by approximately 60%.

Wildfire policy and use of science in the context of a socio-ecological system on the Aegean Archipelago

Abstract This paper summarizes the results of a primarily qualitative (with certain quantitative elements) socio-ecological study on three Greek islands of the Aegean Archipelago to characterize fire science and policy at regional and local levels, and perceptions of fire risk. Among the most important factors influencing dynamics of fire regimes on the islands are changing land use patterns and practices, and changes in climate and fuel conditions. While use of scientific information is not widespread, there are individuals in all three islands who regularly consult scientific sources. Although fire policy is largely controlled at the national and European Union levels, local activity also occurs, most notably through the volunteer fire fighting organizations, interactions with local officials, and public education efforts. However, though seen as important, significant lack of financial support and resources exist to support prevention and pre-suppression programs. Prevention of fires on the islands, including the use of prescribed burning, is relatively inadequate, and while an intense interest in preventing the loss of communities and ecosystems is frequently encountered, public participation in fire prevention remains limited. The findings suggest that relying on local knowledge, in combination with fire managers’ decision-making abilities, could improve fire management options and reduce wildfire suppression costs and ecological disasters.

A Comparison of the Costs of Forest Service and Contract Fire Crews in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract Rising wildfire suppression expenditures on public land in the United States have led to increased scrutiny of wildfire management practices. One area that has received particular attention is the Forest Service's increasing reliance on contract fire crews. Because a contract crew rate includes several costs that are not included in the wage costs of a Forest Service crew, it is difficult to determine if this increasing reliance on contract fire crews increases or decreases wildfire suppression costs. The full cost of 33 Forest Service type II fire crews dispatched during the 2003 fire season from five national forests in Oregon and Washington are estimated and compared with the cost of contract crews dispatched in the same region. Results suggest that if sufficient work is available to keep a Forest Service crew productively employed throughout a fire season, then the daily cost of a Forest Service type II crew is lower than the daily cost of a contract crew. West. J. Appl. For. 20(4):233–239.