Analyzing Trade-Offs Between Fuels Management, Suppression, and Damages from Wildfire

With expenditures to suppress wildfires in the United States increasing rapidly during the past couple of decades, fire managers, scientists, and policy makers have begun an intense effort to develop alternative approaches to managing wildfire. One alternative is “fuels management,” which typically uses prescribed fire or mechanical methods (or both) to reduce fuel loads in dense, overstocked forests. Despite meeting strong resistance from many wildland policy makers and resource managers throughout much of the 20^th century (Yoder et al. 2003), within the past decade prescribed fire has become one of the most frequently promoted approaches to reducing wildfire risk and intensity (Bell et al. 1995, Haines and Cleaves 1999, Hesseln 2000). For example, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 called for dramatic increases in the use of fuel treatments to reduce hazardous fuel loads and the economic costs of wildfire, and one of the main objectives of the National Fire Plan (USDI/USDA 1995) is reducing fuels on 3 million acres annually. Graham et al. (2004) estimated that 100 million acres of forest lands historically burned by frequent surface fires in the western United States may benefit from surface fire restoration and 11 million acres need to be treated to protect communities (Graham et al. 2004), while Rummer et al. (2003) calculated that 66 million acres could benefit from fuels reduction. Progress has been slow, however. Obstacles include public resistance to smoke, planning and regulatory review difficulties, potential impacts on threatened and endangered species, budgetary limitations, risk of escaped fires, and lack of incentives (Stephens and Ruth 2005).

The objectives of this chapter are to (1) characterize the overall problem of economically rational interventions into wildfire processes, (2) describe how economists and other analysts have evaluated the efficacy of fuel treatments, and (3) provide some empirical examples of how we have evaluated the trade-offs among fuel treatments, wildfire suppression, and wildfire damages. A goal of the chapter, however, is also to provide an overall characterization for the many complexities of the problem, due to its spatial and temporal dimensions and its need to account for the multiple impacts of both wildfire and proposed interventions.