Responding to Risky Neighbors: Testing for Spatial Spillover Effects for Defensible Space in a Fire-Prone WUI Community

Travis Warziniack, Patricia Champ (), James Meldrum, Hannah Brenkert-Smith (), Christopher M. Barth () and Lilia C. Falk ()
Additional contact information
Patricia Champ: USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station
Hannah Brenkert-Smith: University of Colorado – Boulder
Christopher M. Barth: Bureau of Land Management
Lilia C. Falk: West Region Wildfire Council

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2019, vol. 73, issue 4, No 4, 1023-1047

Abstract: Abstract Often, factors that determine the risk of an environmental hazard occur at landscape scales, and risk mitigation requires action by multiple private property owners. How property owners respond to risk mitigation on neighboring lands depends on whether mitigation actions are strategic complements or strategic substitutes. We test for these neighbor interactions with a case study on wildfire risk mitigation on private properties. We use two measures of wildfire risk mitigation—an assessment by a wildfire professional and a self-assessment by homeowners. Taken together, the two assessments provide the first empirical explanation for strategic complements in wildfire risk mitigation and a more complete picture of how homeowners respond to this landscape-scale risk. We find homeowners that mitigate risk on their land are more likely to have neighbors that do the same, and homeowners that fail to mitigate risk are more likely to have neighbors that fail to do so as well. Due to spatial spillovers, motivating a few key residents to take action could reduce risk across the landscape.

Keywords: WUI; Neighbor effects; Spatial spillovers; Wildfire; Defensible space; Endogenous risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10640-018-0286-0

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