Evaluating the efficiency, equity, and effectiveness of wildfire suppression strategy using the microeconomic toolkit

Abstract

Most economic research related to wildfires focuses on their impact on people and populations. In my dissertation, I use economic tools to evaluate the efficiency and equity of wildfire suppression strategy. In the first chapter, I investigate whether socioeconomic factors of a community (income, race, age, etc.) are correlated with allocations of suppression effort. I use spatial data on retardant drops from large airtankers (LATs) and demographic information from the Census Bureau to find that communities threatened by wildfire with fewer minority residents, but more low-income residents, are more likely to receive LAT drops. I then find that socioeconomic factors aren't correlated with the decision to use LATs in suppression after conditioning on biophysical factors like fuels and burn probability. In my second chapter, I study whether the media's attention to wildfire influences suppression strategy. I instrument for the effect of media attention using the incidence of catastrophic events that would distract the media to find that media scrutiny of a wildfire has no tangible effect on the decision to use aviation on a fire. Finally, most economic research on wildfire suppression strategy has focused on the costs; little exists on its benefits. I use causal inference methods leveraging satellite data on wildfire growth and intensity, along with the spatial data on aerial suppression effort mentioned previously, to find that large airtankers are effective at limiting the physical extent of wildfire's spread, reducing the intensity of flames as it grows, and slows its spread.