Challenges of Accommodating Non-Market Values in Evaluation of Wildfire Suppression in the United States

Tyron Venn and David E. Calkin

No 9903, 2007 Annual Meeting, July 29-August 1, 2007, Portland, Oregon from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: Presently, implementing the 2001 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, which requires fire management priorities to be set on the basis of maximising the market and non-market values to be conserved or enhanced, is extremely challenging because those charged with implementing the policy have limited information about the value that society places on non-market resources at risk. This paper considers the problem of accommodating non-market values affected by wildfire in social benefit-cost analysis. There are substantial gaps in scientific understanding about how the spatial and temporal provision of non-market values are affected by wildfire, and considerable challenges in evaluating social welfare change arising from specific wildfire events. This presents serious impediments to adapting price-based decision-support tools, such as the National Fire Management Analysis System, to meaningfully incorporate non-market values. An alternative decision-support framework is proposed that measures departure from the historic range and variability of ecological conditions for those non-market values that are particularly resistant to price-based analysis.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea07:9903

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.9903

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