ECONOMICALLY OPTIMAL WILDFIRE INTERVENTION REGIMES

Jeffrey P. Prestemon, D. Evan Mercer, John M. Pye, David T. Butry, Thomas P. Holmes and Karen L. Abt

No 20470, 2001 Annual meeting, August 5-8, Chicago, IL from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: Wildfires in the United States result in total damages and costs that are likely to exceed billions of dollars annually. Land managers and policy makers propose higher rates of prescribed burning and other kinds of vegetation management to reduce amounts of wildfire and the risks of catastrophic losses. A wildfire public welfare maximization function, using a wildfire production function estimated using a time series model of a panel of Florida counties, is employed to simulate the publicly optimal level of prescribed burning in an example county in Florida (Volusia). Evaluation of the production function reveals that prescribed fire is not associated with reduced catastrophic wildfire risks in Volusia County Florida, indicating a short-run elasticity of -0.16 and a long-run elasticity of wildfire with respect to prescribed fire of -0.07. Stochastic dominance is used to evaluate the optimal amount of prescribed fire most likely to maximize a measure of public welfare. Results of that analysis reveal that the optimal amount of annual prescribed fire is about 3 percent (9,000 acres/year) of the total forest area, which is very close to the actual average amount of prescribed burning (12,700 acres/year) between 1994-99.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18
Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/20470/files/sp01pr05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea01:20470

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.20470

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2001 Annual meeting, August 5-8, Chicago, IL from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().