Estimating the societal benefits from wildfire mitigation activities in a payments for watershed services program in Colorado

Kelly W. Jones

No z9skm, EcoEvoRxiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Payments for watershed services (PWS) programs are becoming a popular governance approach in the western United States (US) to fund forest management aimed at source water protection. In this paper we conduct a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of one of the first collaboratively funded PWS programs in the US, located in the municipal watersheds servicing Denver, Colorado. We combine wildfire modeling, sediment modeling, and primary and secondary data on economic values to quantify the impact of the program on protecting multiple values at risk. Our results show that while the program has led to diverse societal benefits, it is only economically efficient (benefit-cost ratio greater than one) when all co-benefits beyond source water protection are considered and fuels treatments are assumed to encounter wildfire. When the probability of wildfire is accounted for, economic benefits would need to be triple what was estimated in our analysis to achieve economic efficiency. Our findings suggest that improving spatial prioritization of interventions would increase economic benefits and better data on treatment placement and costs would help facilitate future CBA of PWS programs focused on wildfire mitigation.

Date: 2021-11-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/619e70796977cd01da49548d/

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:osf:ecoevo:z9skm

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/z9skm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EcoEvoRxiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().